Vita3K 3 year progress: From 3% to 57% playable games for the popular PS Vita emulator

Vita3K is the best (only?) PlayStation Vita emulator out there. The emulator has been in active development since 2018, and it’s seen tremendous progress since its humble beginnings.

Recently, the Vita3K team have been presented a summary of their past 3 years of development. You can read the full blog post here if you’re interested. I have a short summary below:

Graphics and Audio improvements

In the past 3 years, Vita3K has seen significant improvements for Rendering: Vulkan Support (powerful cross platform graphics library which is why Vita3K now has an Android port), Upscaling Support, memory mapping, shader interlock, texture replacement, FSR rescaler, and more. All of those have contributed to significant improvement in rendering speed and quality of the emulator over the past 3 years.

Under the hood, significant progress has also been made on Audio support in the Vita3K emulator. Not all issues are fixed yet, but the new AAC decoder in the emulator has been helping a lot with audio issues in many games.

Others

Possibly less significant at the still early stages of this emulator, the team has added a ton of other “Quality of Life” changes and enhancements: GUI Improvements, a new “compatibility notes” features which helps us seeing at a glance if a game is considered compatible with the emulator, improved language support, an auto updater.

Notably, the team have an “other” section for more improvements, that I’d personally consider quite significant. In no particular order: Improvements to the online (SceNet) library, better input support (gyroscope support in particular), controller remapping, and more.

What does this all mean for the Vita3K PS Vita emulator?

The PlayStation Vita is still worth owning in 2024 in my opinion. It was produced in a time where console exclusives still were a big thing for Sony, and it has a ton of great exclusive games. But if you don’t have the device itself, Vita3K is the next best thing.

Believe it or not, I’m personally not a huge emulator user. I’ll typically try one for a few days, realize it’s not “there” yet, and then promptly forget about it. I feel that these occasional progress updates by the various emulator development teams are a great way for occasional users like me to remember that these emulators can evolve a lot over the years. When it comes to Vita3K, I think a comparison of game compatibility between 2021 and 2024 paints the best picture of Vita3K’s progress:

3 years ago, Vita3K had so little compatibility that they didn’t even bother publishing a chart. But according to the internet wayback machine, around 3% of tested games that were considered playable, in 2021. 3 percent!!!

Fast forward to 2024, and more than half of the Vita’s library is considered playable in Vita3K!

2024 Vita3k compatibility chart

Download Vita3K – PS Vita Emulator

Vita3K is available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Android.

You can Download the latest builds of this PS vita emulator on the site’s official page at https://vita3k.org/index.html#download

Alternatively check their github page at https://github.com/Vita3K/Vita3K/releases