RPCS3 January 2018 Progress Report in a nutshell – Major Ryzen improvements, stability improvements and many more compatible games!
As with Dolphin, development on RPCS3 is pretty active so the team behind it also churns out a progress report every month. Their progress reports are a tad long (although nowhere as long as the Dolphin ones) so this article is here to condense it down into a much quicker read!
Summary of the report
The progress report of last January includes quite a few medium-to-large improvements that most RPCS3 users are bound to enjoy. A general list of what can be found in the report is:
- Stability improvements that will make your games freeze less often especially if you have higher-end hardware that renders some games very quickly.
- Texture formats got a major fix-up which means that now, textures are more likely to be rendered accurately.
- The OpenGL renderer got performance improvements, especially on Nvidia GPUs. Most users use Vulkan rendering but don’t worry, that backend still got improvements!
- Performance on Ryzen CPUs got a decent boost thanks to a thread scheduler that was added to some parts of the emulator.
- Gamepad profiles that save you lots of time if you tend to use different controllers or wish to use different control layouts.
- A native UI implementation got added which includes a save slot screen you may control with the controller. No more alt-tabbing out of your full-screen game!
- Lots of games got compatibility fixes which either made them playable or semi-playable.
Stability improvements and Ryzen CPU performance boost
Thanks to kd-11, the emulator’s stability got greatly improved since now, the emulator can properly recover when RSX threads get out of sync. This scenario occurs when the Vulkan renderer draws the game too fast so now, you will get less crashes on higher-end systems that have more than enough power to render some PS3 games! Games that use Write Colour Buffers such as Demon’s Souls are also much more stable thanks to some fixes by the same developer.
Ryzen CPUs got a measurable performance boost on Windows thanks to a thread scheduler (by kd-11) that was added to the RPCS3’s PPU, SPU and RSX threads as Windows’ own thread scheduler was broken! The performance improvement can also be seen on Core i3 and Core i7 systems so Intel users also get something out of this.
Gamepad profiles and brand-new Native UI implementation

Gamepad profiles save you the headache of remapping your game controls everytime you wish to apply a new control layout!
Gamepad profiles are a huge thing for those who play with different controller layouts as now, you can save custom configurations and load them at a later date! Now, you may also play multiplayer with the same keyboard thanks to improvements from developer ‘megamouse’!
Another noticeable feature is the new Native UI implementation that got added to emulator. This allows for trophy notification dialogues and a much better save utility screen. With this UI implementation, you can choose saves with your controller instead of having to do it in a separate window with your mouse or keyboard. The native UI implementation also makes the emulator much tidier and pleasant to use especially for inexperienced users thanks to messages explaining why games may be stuttering (such as when the emulator is compiling shaders).

Over a quarter of the games in RPCS3 database (which is quite large) are now considered playable with only a small amount of games not loading anything!
Games that got some fixes
These are some of the games that got noticeable fixes:
- Virtua Fighter 5
- Wangan Midnight
- The Bigs 2
- Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 – From only loading the initial portion of the game to running perfectly, even at 1440p at 30FPS if you have sufficient hardware!
- Many more games!
Conclusion
If you wish to read more about the work that the RPCS3 team did last month, simply check out the link below! You may find a good deal of screenshots if you prefer to take your dose of news through pictures rather than words!
Source: https://rpcs3.net/blog/2018/02/07/progress-report-january-2018/
Just want to play Persona 5 and Red Dead in 60 FPS
ninja Gaiden!!! Please!
Call me when they can emulate MGS 4,Yakuza 5,TLOU or GoW Ascension.
There’s no point in emulating PS3 games that are available on PC.
The point is building an emulator that has high compatibility with all games, and you need to make sure your emulation is good enough for the simpler games to run well before you get to the more complex ones that utilize all the intricacies of the PS3. The way you make it sound is like they go game-by-game and build an emulator for each one or something, which is not the case, at least for this emulator.
Yeah, *cough*Xenia*cough*pcsx2*cough
Great article!
Then Destiny can be played or not?
say no to emulation. Original hardware is the way to go imo. unless the console is really old then emulators are okay for me
Who sets the old standard? Is it your choice?
Who sets the old standard? Is it your choice?
Does this emulator have a better chance of running smoothly compared to PCSX2 due to having more familiar hardware than the PS2? Isn’t the Cell CPU and that Nvidia chip far easier to emulate than the PS2’s EE and GSX chips?
Demon souls on my pc, that would be nice