Work continues on RPCS3, the world's foremost (and only reliable) PS3 emulator, but this is perhaps one of the biggest improvements yet.
rpcs3
Developers Nekotekina and KD-11 posted an update video detailing how they've managed to improve the emulator's performance across the board. What this means is that RPCS3 can now better utilize the power of modern gaming hardware to pump far smoother frame rates.
As reported by Overclock3D, the performance uplift affects all PS3 games that the emulator could run as of the moment, with some games (specifically Metal Gear Solid 4) getting as much as a 25-50% frame rate boost. Developer Nekotekina managed to do this by significantly reducing the performance bottlenecks with the CPU (SPUs on the PS3), allowing the GPU (RSX on the PS3) to be better utilized.
Here is the update video posted on the RPCS3 YouTube channel:
With MGS4 as the prime example, you can see how the game got a 20-30 FPS boost on average compared to how it previously ran. They noted how Intel's Alder Lake 12th gen chips benefited the most in terms of increased performance, with AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips seeing not much of an uplift - though it's still an uplift nonetheless.
Some games that used to be not playable due to low frame rates are now playable too. The game Yakuza Ishin! was only able to run at under 30 FPS back then, but with the removal of RPCS3's bottlenecks, it now runs close to 40 FPS which is far smoother than before. But while gameplay performance didn't see much of an upgrade, the game's cutscenes had a runaway boost from 80-90 FPS to as much as 110-180 FPS.
To cap things off, Red Dead Redemption has seen insane improvement in frame rates outside of towns due to GPU/RSX optimizations. However, RPCS3 still struggles to run the game when visiting towns and remains unplayable to this day.
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A New Major Milestone For RPCS3
Ever since development on the PS3 emulator started way back in 2011, progress on it has come a long, long way. The massive performance improvements due to better hardware utilization is just the latest.
Perhaps the biggest, most recent one is the fact that RPCS3 can now boot every single PS3 game ever released including apps, as reported by Eurogamer. In total, that's around 6,000 programs. This milestone was reached in October last year. Sure, the emulator doesn't run all games smoothly, but this is still a massive accomplishment considering the notoriety surrounding the PS3's complicated architecture.
But this also goes to show just how weird it seems for Sony, a multi-billion-dollar company, to not be working on an official backwards compatibility solution involving PS3 games. Even the newly revamped PlayStation Plus' Premium tier only offers PlayStation 3 games via the cloud - aka you stream those games onto your PS4 or PS5 over the internet. You don't play it natively on your machine.
Kudos to Nekotekina and KD-11's work, and here's to hoping for more performance improvements down the line.
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Story posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce