The RPCS3 team recently put out their March progress report, showing off what they've been working on and progress as usual seems to be good.
Firstly, the amount of games being classed as "Playable" continues to grow at a decent pace. As of the latest report 1,188 titles are now fitting that description, up from 1,174 previously so it's improving quickly.
This time around they noted some interesting improvements to texturing systems and lighting, resulting in multiple games now looking a lot more like they should. Take The Last of Us for example, the improvements are quite striking:
You can see more improvements again with Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, now having much improved water rendering:
They also noted work on the SPU Interpreter, which was overhauled into a LLVM-based Interpreter, this unifies some back-end code and simplifies some parts. In addition, the new interpreter saw massive performance improvements with some titles seeing a "20%" improvement in FPS when compared with the legacy implementation. Two titles were mentioned to give an example of this, Sengoku Musou 4 and Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 where the performance went from around 10FPS to 50FPS which really is massive.
One other point I found interesting, is that they discovered an issue on Windows where God of War 3 was performing notably poorly. The issue was due to "frequent file cache buffers flushing by the game", which Linux handled a lot better. They have a fix in place now but I just thought it was interesting, that having RPCS3 on Linux helped them track down a Windows performance issue.
When talking about specific games they noted there's a bit of a theme going to start with: Gran Turismo HD Concept is now playable; Gran Turismo 6 can now get in-game although it suffers some graphical issues; Absolute Supercars, Supercar Challenge, Ferrari Challenge: Trofeo Pirelli and Ferrari: The Race Experience have become "comfortably playable"; Ridge Racer 7 is now playable; NASCAR Unleashed is also playable; Doom 3: BFG Edition is playable; College Hoops 2K7 can get in-game and finally Move Street Cricket I & II are now also playable.
They also noted DualShock 3 support in RPCS3, although they're saying this is only for the Windows build "for the time being" so hopefully that will improve in future. I've no doubt it will, just like every other part of RPCS3 continuing to get better.
See the full report here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
legluondunet May 7, 2019
Last edited by legluondunet on 7 May 2019 at 1:40 pm UTC
Doc Angelo May 7, 2019
I wonder when the first PS4 emulators will show up. As the PS4 (and the XBox One) is pretty much 99% a standard computer, it shouldn't be too hard to pull that off. At least there would be very little actual hardware emulation needed.
Oddly enough, this was true on the original 2004 Xbox, and there's still no good PC emulator (or compatibility layer). Hundreds of Blinx the Cat fans are praying their Xbox never dies.
DasCapschen May 7, 2019
... would really like to replay Killzone 2 and 3 right now xD
Looks like a great update :)
There is Orbital which uses QMEU for virtualization based emulation for the PS4.Beat me to it ;)
Here is a link for anybody who wants to check it out https://github.com/AlexAltea/orbital
Definitely not in a state to be playing any games yet, but it seems like according to here http://wololo.net/2019/03/19/orbital-ps4-emulator-showing-significant-progress-now-with-graphical-output/ that the devs have just recently been able to get some graphical output, so perhaps in a few years it should be useable, especially considering its virtualization and not emulation, so you might even be able to run PS4 games easier then you can PS3 games :)
Last edited by Sol33t303 on 8 May 2019 at 7:30 am UTC
The issue was due to "frequent file cache buffers flushing by the game", which Linux handled a lot better. They have a fix in place now but I just thought it was interesting, that having RPCS3 on Linux helped them track down a Windows performance issue.
This is what we cross developer devs keep telling the Windows only devs, that porting your software to other platforms can help you find and fix bugs that also affect the Windows version by exposing your code to a completely different architecture and compiler.
And it's a very good point. Some argue they don't have the time for it, I argue the opposite - what about all that time possibly wasted that a Linux version might help you track down, as was the exact case here.The issue was due to "frequent file cache buffers flushing by the game", which Linux handled a lot better. They have a fix in place now but I just thought it was interesting, that having RPCS3 on Linux helped them track down a Windows performance issue.
This is what we cross developer devs keep telling the Windows only devs, that porting your software to other platforms can help you find and fix bugs that also affect the Windows version by exposing your code to a completely different architecture and compiler.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me