November was one of the most interesting months of the year thanks to the huge amount of games that jumped out of Nothing into the Ingame/Playable categories. This is in part thanks to the hard work announced in December 1st, which made many previously non-working big titles now start working on RPCS3. Of course, some of the progress towards this announcement was merged gradually during the month of November. In this Progress Report, major emulation improvements will be detailed, followed by a list of noteworthy, interesting, and representative games that improved from these, and lastly individual contributions will be looked at closer.

Table of Contents

Major Improvements
Games
Commits
Closing Words

First things first, the compatibility statistics. In November we saw the category of games that do absolutely Nothing go down by over 100 games, and this while not taking in account any of the games that had reported improvements in December!
We are therefore making a prediction right now: thanks to the SPU/RSX fixes, amongst several other improvements: the number of known games that do Nothing will be less than 100 before the end of the year!

That is quite the feat because when the RPCS3 project got revitalized in January, thanks to Patreon and the full time employment of Nekotekina we had less than 100 games that were Playable – that to quite a lower standard than today. And the category Nothing didn’t even exist because we argued that “What is the point? Almost every game does Nothing anyway”. How far have we come!

Looking at the GitHub statistics for November 16 authors have pushed 172 commits with roughly 11,000 added lines of code, and 5,000 deletions.

Continue reading Progress Report: November 2017

October was a huge month for RPCS3. Our lead graphics developer, kd-11, implemented High Resolution Rendering and made many improvements to the emulator. While Nekotekina made some general improvements to the emulator, which will be discussed in this report, he also bought some parts and assembled a new computer with a future-proof CPU which will allow him to debug RPCS3 more efficiently, faster, and allow him to make sure newer instruction sets like AVX-512 work properly with RPCS3 when the right time comes. You can find more details on the latter and also discuss further on it at https://www.patreon.com/posts/pursuing-avx-512-15151688

Table of Contents

Major Improvements
Games
More Improvements (Commits)
Upcoming
Conclusion

Starting off with the compatibility statistics as usual, the Intro/Loadable/Nothing categories keep growing small and Ingame/Playable titles keep increasing. We’ve also hit 500 playable games this month!

Looking at the GitHub statistics, 16 authors have pushed 131 commits to the master branch. Here 180 files have changed and there have been 12,626 additions and 5,068 deletions of lines of code. Below some of the major improvements from these code changes are summarized.

Continue reading Progress Report: October 2017

September was quite the exciting month. Our lead graphics developer, kd-11, made major improvements to graphics emulation while Nekotekina, among many things, implemented initial networking support. This progress report will provide an overview of major changes and games that improved.

Table of Contents

Major Improvements
Games
Commits
Upcoming
Conclusion

First of all, here are the compatibility statistics for this month. As usual the category of games that do nothing is shrinking while more and more games become playable.

Looking at the GitHub statistics, 15 authors have pushed 131 commits to the master branch. Here 216 files have changed and there have been 9,185 additions and 7,028 deletions of lines of code. Below some of the major improvements from these code changes are summarized.

Continue reading Progress Report: September 2017

August was a month of bug fixes and rewriting old code. In this report some general emulation improvements will be explained, followed by a closer look at some popular and representative games. Lastly, individual contributions will be covered and plans for the future will be detailed.

Table of Contents

Improvements
Games
Commits
Upcoming
Conclusion

First and foremost are the compatibility numbers for August. Finally there are more games that are playable than completely not working! In fact, less than a quarter of all tested games do not at least show something on the screen. Just a year ago there wasn’t even a compatibility database or listing of games that did nothing as almost every games was expected to do nothing or at best be loadable! A lot of the improved games are actually the result of LLE GCM from July as testing and updating the forums and the compatibility database took quite some time. That said, a lot of games improved from new changes this month, which will be covered below.

Looking at the GitHub statistics, 20 authors have pushed 179 commits to the master branch. Here 190 files have changed and there have been 8,587 additions and 3,876 deletions of lines of code. Below some of the major improvements from these code changes are summarized.

Continue reading Progress Report: August 2017

July like every month before it this year set a new record in the number of improvements that happened. Mostly centered around bug fixes and compatibility improvements it is safe to say that if every single improvement were to be covered in great detail this progress report would take more than a month to finish. Therefore the format is now going to change a bit. This report will focus on some major emulation improvements and it will explain what these entail in general. Thereafter a few select more interesting games and how they were improved will be covered. Every improved game will not be covered because there were simply too many, and evaluation of earlier reports indicate that it isn’t interesting content either.

First of all are the compatibility database statistics for the month of July. Take note that the last database update was performed a day before the major emulation improvement known as “LLE gcm” was merged, meaning the hundreds of games improved from this are not listed in the figures below, or even on the compatibility database yet.

Table of Contents

Improvements
Games
Commits
Upcoming
Conclusion

Looking at the GitHub statistics, 18 authors have pushed 201 commits to the master branch. Here 257 files have changed and there have been 14,559 additions and 5,088 deletions of lines of code. What improvements came from these changes? Let’s take a look:

Continue reading Progress Report: July 2017

Another month another colossal RPCS3 progress record. But first things first, take a look at this beautiful introduction to RPCS3 video that reznoire made:

[redacted]

Moving on to some statistics the numbers alone this month are quite impressive, and that is not even counting games that improved from emulation improvements that are still work in progress.

Looking at the GitHub statistics 16 authors have pushed 140 commits to the master branch. Here 353 files have changed and there have been 19,729 additions and 17,660 deletions. These numbers are much larger than normal, and several exciting changes are behind it. This month RPCS3 transitioned away from the previous GUI toolkit Wx to Qt which in turn also lead to several user facing interface improvements. This separate report goes into significantly greater detail regarding what work has already been done on the GUI, and what work is planned to be done in the future. On a lower level, Nekotekina reworked the entire PPU LLVM recompiler to greatly increase compatibility of it. kd-11 fixed various graphical issues affecting hundreds of games, most notably broken shadows and depth of field in various titles. Moreover kd-11 also enabled Vulkan on Linux and pushed support for it to the master branch. Nekotekina and Numan also worked on .sprx relocations in general and in the LLVM recompiler which in simple terms is a compatibility and performance improvement.

The talented developer Jarves is working on a very important core improvement. It is not yet finished or merged to the master branch, but as work on this has been going on in public, and a lot of people have already tested it and submitted results this report will cover the work anyway. Jarves is working on “LLE gcm” which is huge and here is why:

LLE stands for Low Level Emulation. In RPCS3 this means that a PS3 operating system module is run directly as it is via lower level emulation methods. This is great for compatibility because it doesn’t involve much guesswork and is very accurate. As far as the games are concerned, they are working with the exact same operating system methods with the exact same implementations here as on a real PS3.

gcm or “graphics command management” is the part of the PS3 operating system responsible for creating and managing various graphics commands, including everything from how to set up vsync to graphics memory allocation.

LLE gcm is huge. A very core part of emulating games is now done exactly the same as on on a real PS3, and the result is amazing. For example Red Dead Redemption no longer hangs almost instantly. The Last of Us doesn’t crash immediately and actually shows a loading screen and goes through a lot of initialisation successfully. [redacted] no longer randomly crashes. Various high end games that did nothing before are now starting to boot, for example the Yakuza series where Yakuza 3 went from nothing to ingame, and Yakuza 4 and 5 went from nothing to loading screens. One could go on and on about what a substantial compatibility improvement LLE gcm is (and I will). Now combine this with the greatly improved LLVM recompiler and over 40 commits of graphics fixes and you have a month of quite insane progress. This would be a great segway into looking at improved games and such, but Jarves did one other important contribution that deserves its own section.

Continue reading Progress Report: June 2017