> Of course that only applies to > the emulation of very recent systems.
It applies even to systems that we don't think of as "very recent". I was reading the Nocash documentation on the PS1 just the other day, and I seem to recall that clear operations on the PS1's GPU will clear VRAM in blocks of 32 bytes per cycle. That's something that only really became viable on modern CPUs with the introduction of AVX extensions.