Release: Vita3K Build 2938 (PS Vita Emulator), and the current status of Vita emulation

We haven’t talked about Vita3K in quite a while, several years actually it seems. The PS Vita emulator has made tremendous progress over the years. release builds are pretty much done on a daily basis with an automated pipeline, so there isn’t a proper “release” we can talk about, but it’s been long enough that we should look how Vita3K’s been doing.

What is Vita3K

Vita3K is a PS Vita emulator. The official Readme describe it as “an experimental PlayStation Vita emulator for Windows, Linux and macOS.”. The Vita3K emulator supports OpenGL and Vulkan.

What’s new in Vita3K

3 years ago when we last talked about it Vita3K had no actually “playable” games. This has significantly changed, with now a bit more than 400 games being playable in the emulator, or roughly 40% of tested games.

Among popular playable games are Persona 4 Golden, Velocity 2X, Velocity Ultra, Tales From space: Mutant Blobs attack, OlliOlli2 and Hotline Miami.

In other words, significant progress has been made on Vita3k, and the emulator was recently showcased running on the Steam Deck.

I won’t lie though, in our own tests, “playable” didn’t necessarily mean “enjoyable”. On our semi-recent setup with an RTX 2080 and a Ryzen 5600G, Persona 4 Golden ran at about 15 fps, with significant sound lags. It was certainly playable for dialog sections, but definitely not the best way to enjoy the game. I’m sure tweaks and options are available to improve this, we used the default settings. It’s worth mentioning that switching between Vulkan and OpenGL might help depending on your setup.

Simpler games (such as homebrew game “Treasure Chasers“) worked flawlessly though, and that might be were Vita3K will turn to be priceless in the years to come: as a way to preserve homebrew games that only ever made it to this platform. Vita exclusive commercial games are of course the other obvious target for playability as well (Uncharted Golden Abyss, LittleBigPlanet Vita, and more come to mind).

I also occasionally found untested games to work pretty well, such as Broken Sword 5, which as far as I could tell worked great in the emulator. Interest is limited of course, for games which already exist, often in a superior version, on PC. And of course, there still remains a good 60% of games for which heavy work is still required. In my tests, games such as LittleBigPlanet or X-Com, as expected, were able to load, but were unplayable due to graphical glitches.

An actual PS Vita remains the best way to enjoy Vita games today (and it’s super easy to hack!), but it’s great to see that Vita3K is getting almost daily improvements to this day!

Download Vita3K

You can Download the latest Vita3K builds here.