How can I emulate JUST or AVX2 in game? SDE (Intel® Software Development Emulator)

[Davirezende]

I'm trying to play a game, but I don't have AVX2, and I wanted to emulate it, but the game's fps is very bad, and I only want to emulate AVX2, not a complete CPU, how can I do that?

[AdyT_Intel]

Intel SDE is designed to use all the features that exists on the running host.

This means that if your machine has AVX but not AVX2 it will emulate only the AVX2 instructions and not the AVX instructions.

However, the overhead of this emulation depends on the dynamic ratio of emulated instructions. Each emulation routine takes dozens of cycles or more. Therefore, when your workload has significant amount of emulated instructions the slowdown might be at the range of 5-20x slower then full native run.

Try using an AVX chip knob such as -bdw to limit the workload usage of other (more recent) ISA features such as AVX-512.

You can speed up the emulation a bit by using less accurate emulation by adding the following option "-emu-xinuse 0".

[Davirezende]

How can I use these commands: -"bdw" and "-emu-xinuse 0"?

[AdyT_Intel]

Download Intel SDE from the download page, extract the files using tar utility and run SDE in a shell window:

% <kit>/sde -bwd -emu-xinuse 0 -- <command>

More details are available in Intel SDE main web page or in the kit documentation. SDE web page is https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/tool/software-development-emulator.html

[Davirezende]

Do I have to put this in cmd? Where do I put the name of the game?

When I paste this into cmd it says "The command syntax is incorrect."

How do I make the game work well?

Thank you for your help

[AdyT_Intel]

Please follow the instructions how to run Intel SDE which are in the web page above.

When copy/paste command make sure that you are copying plain text characters and not Unicode multi-byte wide characters.

This does not guarantee that the game will work well, as there is no magic here and if you are running on old and slow machine, then no emulator will be able to provide good performance.