The RPCS3 PS3 Team have shared a video showcasing some major GFX improvements in the popular PS3 engine.

What is RPCS3

RPCS3 is a Sony PlayStation 3 Emulator running on Windows, Linux, and BSD. From the project’s page:

The world’s first free and open-source PlayStation 3 emulator/debugger, written in C++ for Windows and Linux. RPCS3 was founded by programmers DH and Hykem. Initially hosted on Google Code, the project was eventually migrated to GitHub later on in its development. RPCS3’s first successful boots were primarily composed of small homebrew projects and hardware tests. The emulator was later publicly released in June of 2012 and gained substantial attention from both the open-source community and PlayStation enthusiasts alike. Today, RPCS3 is primarily developed by its two lead developers; Nekotekina, kd-11 and backed by flourishing team of GitHub contributors.

RPCS3 – What’s been improved?

The video showcases about 20 games that have been significantly improved with this upcoming update. This makes some AAA titles playable on the PS3 emulator while they were considered as having game breaking glitches until now. From the video summary:

Over the past few months, kd-11 has made a slew of changes improving RPCS3’s accuracy which have fixed many graphical issues including those seen in God of War 3/Ascension, Infamous 2/FoB, Dante’s Inferno, Demon’s Souls and more! These changes have even made some PS3 or Console exclusives Playable on RPCS3 such as The Darkness!

All changes shown were made by kd-11, and mostly from two changesets, which affected AAA Exclusives and multiplatform games alike. A new Precise ZCULL setting has been added to RPCS3 (on by default) which fixes some culling issues (broken skybox in Dante’s Inferno, Sun shining through objects in Demon’s Souls and some lights in Killzone 2 & 3 are no-longer visible through objects.

Precise ZCULL also fixes games that relied on accurate area distance tracking to calculate values for bloom, blur and other post-processing effects which resulted in issues like The Darkness being far too bright, or One Piece: Pirate Warriors having broken Blur.

kd-11 also improved RPCS3’s Fragment Decompiler by implementing a previously unknown special mode used for shader interpolation. This fixed missing/broken effects e.g certain effects in God of War 3/Ascension, headlights in MotorStorm Apocalypse and also fixed some brightness issues e.g in Call of Juarez Gunslinger.

Games that have received major improvements as showcased in the video:

• inFamous 2
• inFamous: festival of Blood
• God of War Ascension
• God of War 3
• MotorStorm: Apocalypse
• Beyond: Two Souls
• Tomb Raider
• PlayStation Home
• Dead Island
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
• Trine 2
• Resistance 3
• The Darkness
• Demon’s Souls
• Dante’s Inferno
• One Piece: Pirate Warriors
• Goldeneye 007: Reloaded
• Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing
• God Mode
• The Cave
• Brutal Legend

Download RPCS3 PS3 Emulator

You can Download the latest release, RPCS3 0.0.18 on the project’s official page here.

Game compatibility List here.