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.
  

  Ryzen users rejoice as RPCS3 got a great performance boost on your hardware!

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:

1. Virtua Fighter 5
2. Wangan Midnight
3. The Bigs 2
4. 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!
5. 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/