QUOTE (Agozer @ Aug 8 2008, 07:17 AM)

It all has to do with the console's own hardware having specific hardware for specific tasks and those pieces of chips and whatnot are designed to work in sync with each other.
Now take a look at the PC hardware; while it has hardware for graphics audio and whatnot, similar to,say, the PS2, none of that hardware is specifically designed to do e.g. graphics just for, COD4 or PS2 games. This hardware has to do many things, things which vary in complexity and execution, whereas the hardware of the PS2 for example, has to only worry about stuff pertaining to the PS2 and PSX.
To top it off, the reason the PS2 is so well backwards compatible with the PSX is because the PS2 isn't emulating the PS1, but the PS2 has the hardware of the PSX inside it.
Now, to get back to the original problem: the problem is that even if you tell the PC graphics card to work with the PS2's graphics data, it cannot understand that data, because the PC graphics card wasn't specifically designed to understand the PS2's graphics routines. So something has to translate this mess for the graphics card in order for it to output something visible to the user. And this "translator" happens to be your processor.
The faster your processor is, and the more cores it has, doing specific translation work themselves, the faster the resulting emulation will be.
Same with sound and every other component that the console has, and this is why emulation of console can never be compared directly to PC games.
This is how it will always be with PCs, and the only way to make this translation noticeable faster is to split the translation effort to many processors, i.e. multiple cores in the same processor. Unless hardware manufacturers come into some agreement where they start to embed console hardware seamlessly into everyday PCs this approach to emulation will never change.
ANd thus forcing the mass to rely on modchips/swap magic for their emulation needs...
I see...Maybe next birthday i'll purchase a quad core, and see how much of a difference will there be.