Release: RPCS3 (PS3 Emulator) 0.0.24. Performance improvements, Improved game compatibility & more!
The folks behind RPCS3 have published a new release tag for the popular PS3 Emulator. As always, there is no official changelog for this release, but it’s been 6 months since we last talked about the emulator, and changes since then have been significant, including MacOS support.
It’s worth noting that RPCS3 actually gets a build for pretty much every commit, so these release tags are a bit “artificial” and it’s likely most users are already up to date, but a new release tag is a good opportunity to talk about RPCS3 🙂
What is RPCS3
From the official site:
RPCS3 is a multi-platform open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger written in C++ for Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD. The purpose of the project is to completely and accurately emulate the Sony PlayStation 3 Computer Entertainment System in its entirety with the power of open-source community and reverse engineering.
Our goal is to preserve the legacy of the PlayStation 3 hardware and its vast library by bringing it and its exclusives to the PC platform. We want to achieve this by targeting and supporting multiple operating systems as well as being compatible with a wide range of computer hardware with realistic requirements.
RPCS3 was initially developed by DH and Hykem in 2011, with now Nekotekina and kd-11 leading the charge with a total of more than 20 active contributors.
RPCS3 plays close to 70% of the PS3 library without any problem (up from 65% 6 months ago). In the remaining 30% of the pie, most games can be played but have “serious glitches”, and less than 4% do not work with the emulator yet.
What’s new in RPCS3 0.0.24
There is no official changelog for these regular, automated builds, so the bravest among us can dig into the 778 commits that have been made since the 0.0.21 release tag. At a quick glance, we see platform specific improvements (MacOS, Windows,…), game specific improvements (Singstar,…), initial support for Linux Aarch64, initial support for Apple GPUs, and multiple bug fixes and refactors (which may or may not have fixed bugs or performance issues).
We’ll have to wait for an official statement or blog post from the devs to know the “big” changes that have been made over the past few months, but they are mentioning a couple key points on their twitter account:
- MacOS support
- Savestates support
- Graphic glitch fixes in games such as Demon’s Souls
- More games made compatible, including gems such as LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (EU Demo). Haha, really, most games you actually care about are playable already!
- Performance Improvements through RSX and SPU optimizations
Check out this video showcasing some of the improvements:
RPCS3: A look back at 11 years of development
RPCS3 turns 11 years old this year. We started talking about it in 2014 here on Wololo.net, when the emulator started running a handful of commercial games semi-reliably. One of the comments back then said: “By the time we can emulate PS3 and PS4 we’ll probably already have a colony in Mars.”. Well, maybe this video of RPCS3 running Metal Gear Solid 4 in 4K 60FPS confirms some people were overly pessimistic back then 🙂
Download and install RPCS3
You can download the latest build from the RPCS3 Download page. That page also provides installation instructions.
Once the emulator is installed, follow the quickstart guide. Due in particular to legal restrictions, you’ll need to install a bunch of additional material for the emulator to run, which is what the quickstart guide is for.
But confused on why the emulator performs better on the Intel socket compared to the amd socket… Especially when the ps3 uses a stem cell processor that’s closely related to amd processors of the time. I know the architecture is different but it should perform better on amd sockets
Lol it’s not the stem cell processor, the full name is “Cell Broadband Engine,” which is a bit weird but not named after stem cells. Also, the Cell isn’t closely related to any AMD processor, but is closely related to the old PowerPC chips used in 90s/early 00s Macs, as well as the Gamecube and Wii/U. Maybe you were thinking of Gamecube/Wii’s combination of a PowerPC G3 CPU and an ATI Radeon GPU? (not trying to mock or talk down to you, just trying to clear that up)
But as far as the performance question, historically it was simply because Intel had higher single-threaded performance, and although RPCS3 will happily use multiple cores, single-threaded performance is still important for some demanding tasks. In recent years, AMD has closed the performance gap (and sometimes even outperformed Intel), however with Core i3/5/7/9 11000 series, Intel introduced the AVX-512 instruction set for consumers (it’s been in Xeons for a while longer), and that can yield some pretty significant performance boosts. Unfortunately for consumers, it’s not currently useful for much beyond RPCS3, although a few other emulators like Yuzu, Citra, and PCSX2 stand to benefit in the future. Another sad fact is that Intel has disabled AVX-512 on the newest Alder Lake CPUs (all chips manufactured this year, and a few batches from 2021), so you have to try to hunt down a specific batch number if you really want that performance boost. AMD does not currently support AVX-512, but will add it with Zen 4 / Ryzen 7000 series chips in the near future (note that some laptop Ryzen 7000 chips will actually be based on Zen 2 or 3, and will not include AVX-512).
If you want to read more on the subject, one of the RPCS3 devs talks about AVX-512 here
https://whatcookie.github.io/posts/why-is-avx-512-useful-for-rpcs3/
although it doesn’t cover other variables in the performance equation, like how single-threaded performance has improved over the years with larger cache size, better branch prediction, etc.
Wow over 10 years of development, does this mean that a PS4 and and PS5 emulator will take longer, or be faster cause the architecture is more like a PC?
I would say that RPCS3 would require a faster CPU to emulate the PS3 than a PS4 emulator would and the reason is because a PS4 and PS5 have hardware similar to a PC, which means similar instruction set and architecture, in fact emulators required to emulate a PS4/PS5 simply need to run the games either as a Virtual Machine or a backend, that being said the same cannot be said about the PS3 which had unique hardware including different processing units responsible for different graphical and CPU functions of running a game for the PS3 and is a lot harder to emulate, I have an RTX 3090 and an 8th gen core i7 8700K and my CPU was my bottleneck and I got 35fps in God of War 3 during combat and 45fps when not fighting, people who have a 12th gen Alder Lake i9 CPU get over 120fps (if also using an RTX 3090)
alike flycast with the libshacccg prx
i would dream of an adrenaline-ps3-on-my-psvita
precompiled ps3 4.89 cfw with cached loading
the vita compatibility layer would interact ps3 libtiff overlay in xmb
and as a companion app if not remote xD