This is a bit of an updated post for some hardware that sort of fell into my lap that I’m trying to decide what to do with. I found a rig on the trash that has a GTX 970 and after taking off the cooler I learned it has an i7 4790 CPU. For the time it came out, this was pretty top tier hardware, but obviously today it’s dated.
So I was thinking of doing a living room emulation build with this, for games up to wii/PS2, and maybe some older PC games as well. I was originally thinking of going with batocera, but considering I would like to do retro PC gaming as well, I’m not sure this is the best option. I don’t know if bazzite would be the best option either, since that usually focuses on modern pc gaming.
So any thoughts on the best software for this rig, for the uses I’m thinking?
If your plan is emulation, Bazzite makes setting up either EmuDeck or RetroDeck very simple.
Just make sure to grab the Nvidia driver variant.
You can pick from KDE or Gnome, Bazzite does both.
A whole main, original thrust of Bazzite was to make it much more simple to set up emulation on a SteamDeck, uses a ‘everything is flatpaks’ approach by default, to keep things simple.
I run Bazzite on my Deck, works great for emulating older games, running modern games, I even set up a debian environment inside it via DistroShelf to do more complex dev type stuff.
With those specs, you should be able to run HL2 or a PS2 emulator just fine, I’d think, just keep the resolution at 1080p… maybe somethings you could take up to 2K, still be at or over 60fps, basically for games released prior to ~2006/7/8?