Geo,
You need to understand a few things..
First and foremost, although gaming on laptop computers has really advanced by leaps and bounds these past fiv eor ten years, it is not always going to be perfect.. In order to get the best performance you gotta run your CPU at full speed - something that can still be a challenge for a lot of laptops and their GPU's when running that kind of hardware in small confined spaces.. If you truly are getting sub-par performance from your machine even with dual-core options forced on in the emulator your machine may be throttling itself. This is a protection method to guard against your machine become unstable or worse (meltdown).. Even tho today's mobile CPUs and GPUs are tailored for the task, they are still gonna have heat issues. If your system is throttling there isn't anything you can do except find a way to disable the feature with either some kind of software, or by changing BIOS settings, or something like that...
Secondly.. You can not compare PC games to Console games running in an emulator.. The whole point of using an emulator is that you are configuring your computer to imitate the gaming machine you desire to use. When it came to simple 8-bit machines and even 16-bit machines, this wasn't a huge problem. People's home PC's kept up with the power demands easily with a little help from Moor's Law.
However Playstation,N64, Saturn and every game console since has turned emulation into an entirely NEW ballgame. Modern game consoles are complex machines in their own right. They have very powerful CPU's that in most, if not all cases, are custom made. They do not speak the same language as x86 and x64 CPU's that we use in home PC's today..
It takes power to emulate powerful machines. The math probably involves variables that multiply enormously. It took a LONG time to perfect and understand PlayStation 1 emulation, as well as the best way to design future emulators and so on and so forth.. We still do not have a state of near perfect emulation, like the older and first emulators have been able to achieve. Mostly because it takes a lot of time and effort, and also it takes a lot of trial and error, and willingness to explore and exploit and reserve engineer every nook and cranny of a machine. People hit walls, they get bored, they reach the limit of their technical skills, etc..
This all influences how soon and how fast we can emulate new machines. It will take MANY years yet, for a set of PC parts to come out, powerful enough to fully emulate the consoles we have today..
Stuff like the PS3 is going to be a truly monumental undertaking, I assure you!
Try running a virtual machine on your computer, and installing windows to it and everything.. then run it and see how slow it runs. That's the same problem with emulation.. although we can cheat when emulating other x86 based computers, because we can write shortcuts for the emulator to use the atualy x86 features that still exist on modern CPU's.. That luxury is not available for home consoles.
Sorry this took so long, but I started typing and couldn't stop... Figured I might as well get the big picture across :excl: