March 2017 beat the previous record set by February 2017 as the most eventful month in the history of the project. So much happened that even this colossal progress report can only begin to scratch the surface.
First of all, lead RPCS3 developer Nekotekina reached the $1000 goal on Patreon, securing his long time commitment to work on RPCS3 full time. This was the direct result of the massive amount of attention the project got when two popular games were drastically improved this month. First, Demon’s Souls went from crashing in zero seconds to going ingame and almost being playable. Second, the cult classic Catherine received significant performance improvements and now runs with practically perfect graphics and performance. The two videos of these games received over 200 000 views on the official RPCS3 YouTube channel. Even the famous YouTube personality, TotalBiscuit was impressed with the progress, and the killing of the notorious Demon’s Souls boss Vanguard in RPCS3.
Of course the hundreds of videos posted by the community on YouTube, different forum posts, Reddit submissions, and so on, have contributed greatly to the massive growth of the RPCS3 community. In fact, new developer Inviuz aka Numan was one of these people who recently discovered RPCS3, spent a lot of hours reading the code and debugging Demon’s Souls, and finally getting it to boot for the first time. Oh and Red Dead Redemption also went to the main menu thanks to this, and some graphics improvements by kd-11. This showcases one of the most important strengths of RPCS3 being free and open-source software and it is very likely that more and more people will join the project in the future and contribute changes both big and small.
Since the last progress report, approximately 17 authors have made 115 commits with 6,831 lines of code added, and 4,471 lines of code deleted. And some significant improvements are still in the pipeline but have yet to be merged.
The progress report is mainly split into three different parts. First we will take a closer look at what each pull request this month did, and show a few practical examples. Thereafter we will take a look at a selection of some interesting games that were improved this month, though this is just a small slice of the hundreds upon hundreds of games that received small or significant improvements this month. Lastly we will take a look at some of the upcoming changes before rounding of this monthly progress report.
This Month’s Contributions
Let us start with Nekotekina who did some significant work this month. Over 60 commits encompassing a lot of major improvements such as automatic LLE module selection (probably the single most requested feature ever), LLVM 4 for Ryzen support, and staggering performance and stability improvements in many games.
Nekotekina’s Contributions
Automatic LLE (#2459)
Probably the single most anticipated feature ever. If you don’t know what this is, RPCS3 previously required you to manually pick which firmware modules should be loaded for each game. People would often have to refer to long lists of 20+ modules on the forums, often discovered by trial and error. However this is all ancient history now. RPCS3 will analyze the game executable and automatically load the required libraries now.
Reservations rewritten (#2404)
Substantial performance and stability improvements in many games. For example Catherine, [redacted], and Demon’s Souls saw large performance improvements from this. In fact, [redacted] is literally 10 times faster in all scenarios now, going from about 1 to about 10 FPS in the opening scene for example. In battles and dungeons [redacted] can peak at 30 FPS already. Catherine also runs at a stable 30 FPS in all scenarios with an overclocked Haswell-E 6-core or a Ryzen 7 8-core.
