PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 has the May report out, amount of playable titles continues increasing

More fantastic work from the RPCS3 emulator team, with the report for May now available that highlights some more recent work done to improve the project. As a reminder, their reports are delayed by months as they're written by volunteers, you can apply to help here.

Amusingly, the amount of games playable they're tracking is now at 1337 (about 43.71%), up from 1258 (about 41.27%) in April. They really are making quick progress, which is incredibly considering the huge task it is to create such software.

Across May they did work on improving the surface cache, which sounds like it wasn't particularly easy. The work on this and the new method has resulted in less games seeing a black screen at certain points, along with other graphical issues being solved with it. You can see an example of the improvements with Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time below, the results speak for themselves:

Another big optimization made it in this round too, with support for "Position-independent code (PIC)" which has resulted in less stuttering and more FPS. It all sounds delightfully complicated, from what they say (I'm paraphrasing here) the emulator needed to run over the PS3 game code and turn it into code that our computers understand using LLVM. What they've done is make the code the emulator spits out loadable anywhere and so it's reusable. This should improve tons of games, with Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage as an example going from 11 FPS when using certain abilities to a smoother 25-30FPS.

Onto specific game compatibility improvements: Yakuza 3 & 4 should work better on AMD GPUs, Genji: Days of the Blade became playable, Cash Gun Chaos DLX became fully playable with a video to show it off:

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Additionally SIREN: Blood Curse can be completed, One Piece: Pirate Warriors is playable but has audio issues with lots of enemies, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is now playable, Cross Edge is also now playable and Dark Mist is also playable but only with OpenGL.

Really fun to see all the progress on this, sounds like it shouldn't be too long before the majority of games become playable in some form. It's made such huge progress in the last year it's crazy. If you wish to help, they have a Patreon.

See the full report and all the technical details here.

Update: Previously we said this was the June report, it was in fact May.