RPCS3 is an open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger written in C++, developed for Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD
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Welcome back to the first progress report of the year. Quite a large number of fixes and improvements have been made already, and as you can see below from the big compatibility bump we are starting the year off strong. kd-11 has made some major improvements that increase stability and functionality including increasing performance with Ryzen and implementing a Native UI to RPCS3. While Nekotekina has continued to review people’s changes, making sure everything was in a good enough state to be merged, he continued to work on the core of RPCS3. Megamouse has also made many improvements to the way RPCS3 handles input allowing a bunch of games to progress further and he also fixed other issues with the UI.
On the compatibility database statistics, over a hundred games moved out of the Nothing, Loadable, and Intro sections and in to Ingame or Playable. In addition, the Nothing section has now fallen below 2% of tested games, and hopefully Loadable will follow next. This means RPCS3 is on the right track to ensure accuracy and compatibility with the largest number of titles possible.
RPCS3 is an open source Sony Playstation 3 emulator for Windows and Linux. Currently, it has two full-time paid developers, and numerous volunteer developers. RPCS3 has existed since 2011, but development took off a year ago when the Patreon launched and Nekotekina followed by kd-11 began working on the emulator full time. This post will summarize what interesting developments and progress has happened in the last year. If you want to see how the codebase has changed over time, you can head over to the full list of merged PRs for 2017 and check it out. As seen on the GitHub statistics page we had 630 pull requests merged during 2017, and many of these contain numerous commits. That is a lot of code!
RPCS3? What Does That Even Mean?
When you think about it there is a tradition of Sony emulator names in this style. You have ePSXe, PCSX2, JPCSP, PPSSPP, and now RPCS3 as examples of PS1, PS2, PSP, and PS3 emulators. There is a story behind all of these names of course, but in the case of this little PS3 emulator it was given this name by the founder DH (who no longer works on the project). It is an abbreviation and combination of Personal Computer (PC) and PlayStation 3 (PS3). PC + PS3 = PCS3. What does the R stand for? DH and BlackDemon recollect that it used to stand for Real as back in 2011 there were only fake malware emulators around. Then at some point DH who is from Ukraine started saying the R stood for Russian which is what we roll with today as Nekotekina who joined in late 2013 and quickly became one of the biggest developers and the architect, is from Russia. So RPCS3 stands for Russian Personal Computer Station 3.
In this image of the old branding from 2016 RPCS3 is written with the Russian letter я, though this letter is in fact not pronounced like a Latin R at all (it is [ja] as in “yard”).
A short introduction
Where Were We One Year Ago?
One year ago in January of 2017 RPCS3 development had stagnated. The emulator itself ran almost no games properly, only roughly 20 titles were playable, and most of these were simple 2D games. Quite a few more did show intros or even go ingame, but due to generally very poor performance, bugs, and crashes almost nothing was really playable.
January 15th, 2017, tkoham opened an issue suggesting that RPCS3 launch a Patreon. A long discussion starting on GitHub and moving on over to a new and at the time “private” Discord channel and a few days later, the Patreon was launched. Shortly after, the Discord server went public and the new website launched. At the time, only a handful of commercial games even booted, and only the simplest of games, such as the Arkedo series, were anything near playable. The UI was unwieldy, installing games was tedious, and manually picking LLE modules was an immense challenge. Development had slowed considerably, with only Nekotekina and a handful of others making occasional commits. Continue reading RPCS3 2017 Wrap-up: A Stunning Year of Progress
What a way to end the year, eh? We started the last month of 2017 with a bang with RPCS3 taking major steps towards emulating many heavy hitting AAA titles, including quite a few exclusives like Uncharted and God of War. Some moved in to Loadable, others Ingame, and a few are even playable now. More can be read about this here. While these changes were made last month and received a post of their own, they had an impact on many other games that were discovered this month, and such incredible work deserves recognition. This progress report will focus on progress over the month of December. First and foremost, below is a video summary and report of various games that improved this month. Take a look, and read on for even more detail!
First of all, let us have a look at the compatibility database statistics. As we predicted last month the number of games in the Nothing category is now less than 100! A year ago this with the Loadable and Intro categories represented the biggest chunk of registered games, most simply did not work more or less.
However we are now making quite a drastic change to how compatibility is counted. Above different versions of the same game are counted separately. So for example instead of simply having one entry for Demon’s Souls, there are currently four entries: the european disc and PSN versions, and the american disc and PSN versions. This could even become six entries if someone were to test the japanese counterparts.
This is a very traditional way for emulators to look at compatibility, but because of the nature of such a “modern” console like PS3, there can be a lot of different versions of the same game. We have different regions: Europe, America, Japan, Asia, Korea, Hong Kong. And for each region the disc version and the PSN version.
So as can be seen below, we are merging all entries of the same game under the same media type (disc or digital), into a single entry.
There are some differences on compatibility between media types, like Demon’s Souls, where only the disc versions are currently playable, while the PSN versions fail to get past a black screen. But every disc version is playable the same, and every PSN version fails the same, so it makes sense to simply count the disc versions Playable once, and the PSN versions as Nothing once in the statistics.
Also note that not every game is merged yet, so the entries count is likely to go down again in the next month.
Speaking of statistics, over on github 13 authors have pushed 95 commits where roughly 115 files were changed, with 5000 lines added, and 1400 lines removed.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
May was a very eventful month for RPCS3 as we saw significant core and performance improvements. The goal of this progress report is to highlight some of the more notable or interesting developments of the project. The report will start by showcasing a selection of games that were improved in one way or another. Thereafter we will summarize what work each contributor did this month.
kd-11 joined Nekotekina’s Patreon
You can read about this in more detail here.
The short version is that kd-11 is an extremely talented graphics developer who has helped RPCS3 since January of 2016. Without his work RPCS3 would not be here today. It goes the other way around too of course, without the significant core accuracy and performance improvements by Nekotekina we would not be here today either. Therefore it make sense for two great minds to join forces. With the generous Patreon support kd-11 will be able to acquire new hardware for development and testing. On the short term purchasing list is a modern NVIDIA GPU, a modern AMD GPU, and possibly a Skylake+ laptop of some kind. This would allow kd-11 to fix specific issues on these platforms. Not many people use RPCS3 with integrated Intel graphics but they are technically fast enough (for now at least). The problems lie in very very buggy Intel graphics drivers which is why it would help to have direct access to it.
Check out this video below, it highlights some games that saw performance improvements from “the secret build” which was a huge general graphics rework, with focus in particular on Vulkan.
