Hello, I’m Whatcookie, an RPCS3 contributor. I’m here today to talk about the brand new 60FPS patch for Demon’s Souls. But before we discuss the details of the patch, let’s first take a look at some 4K 60FPS gameplay:

Demon’s Souls has long been one of the most popular titles for RPCS3. When it went ingame for the first time it made gaming headlines everywhere. I had been following RPCS3 pretty loosely at the time, but when Demon’s Souls went ingame I finally tried out the emulator. Back then the graphics were quite broken, and I was lucky if the framerate went over 20FPS. But despite all that it was still amazing to me. I thought to myself “Wow, it will be so incredible when the game is playable at 30FPS… maybe in 2 years or so”. The game ended up being very playable much earlier than I expected, all the way back in 2017. Since performance was so solid I thought that it would only be a matter of time before someone out there would make a 60FPS patch.
Continue reading New Demon’s Souls 60FPS+ patch

Yes, you’ve read correctly. Many of the much awaited exclusives are now finally starting to be emulated by RPCS3. In this blog post, you’ll learn which games we know to have improved and how we’ve done it.
But first, check out this awesome teaser:

Table of Contents

SPU Improvements by Jarves
RSX Improvements by kd-11
List of known Improved Games
Closing Words

SPU Improvements by Jarves

There were two main changes to the SPU emulation that brought us to this point of allowing so many newer titles to progress past ‘Intro.’ Let’s take a quick look at both individually.

SPU Interrupt Fix

Many titles in RPCS3 ‘hang’, but in the case of the titles mentioned above, they do not actually crash, and the fps counter would still change with just a black screen. This normally would be mistaken for RPCS3 just being slow and the game taking a bit to load, but opening up the debugger in RPCS3 tells a different story. The games would loop over the same code on both the PPU side and SPU side. In this case, they are waiting on something, but what?

‘The Last of Us’. More like – ‘The Last Loop That Will Ever Execute’Moving the PC to address 0 of an SPU thread explains more. Most games will have just 0 (null) written there, but some actually have a branch there.

Continue reading RPCS3 Begins to Emulate Several Awaited AAA Exclusives. Here’s How We’ve Done It!

Veteran RPCS3 graphics developer kd-11 is joining Nekotekina’s Patreon. kd-11 has worked on RPCS3 since January 2016 and has since then fixed countless bugs in all graphics renderers and implemented a lot of missing functionality. Without his dedicated work, RPCS3 would certainly not be where it is today.

As you know lead core developer Nekotekina, who has worked on RPCS3 since 2013, launched his highly successful Patreon in January this year. Thanks to the overwhelming amount of support, he has been able to work on RPCS3 full time for 5 months now and the progress he has done is staggering. The RPCS3 team has discussed the best course of action for the road forward and have decided that the time is now right for kd-11 to join Nekotekina’s Patreon in order for him to obtain hardware necessary for development and testing.

The Purpose

As kd-11 works on the graphics side of things, especially the renderers using OpenGL, Vulkan, and D3D12 (Direct3D 12), modern hardware is required for development and testing. Ideally, he needs a modern AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPU to easier identify bugs specific to one platform. Furthermore, kd-11 works as a consultant and therefore has the possibility to accept or turn down certain jobs. If support on Patreon reaches a certain level, he may be able to spend more time on the project.

As of now the goal is obtaining necessary hardware for development and testing:

• – A modern AMD GPU that supports DirectX12 and Vulkan.
• – A modern Nvidia GPU that supports DirectX12 and Vulkan.
• – A modern Intel CPU where the iGPU supports DirectX12 and Vulkan

Roadmap

With the support of generous patrons kd-11 will be able to work on the following tasks:

Short term

• – Investigate game specific bugs like the overly bright bloom in [redacted] or the overly dark lighting in Demon’s Souls.
• – Improve performance and compatibility of all renderers.
• – Enable Vulkan on Linux, which will bring a tremendous performance improvement for some games.
• – Implement missing functionality that will fix various bugs in different games. For example, the broken shadows in many games including Demon’s Souls depend on this task.

Mid term

• – Properly support some PlayStation 3 features like MSAA that are lacking at the moment.
• – Implement RSX reports which are missing at the moment.

Long term

• – Enable higher rendering resolution to play games at any resolution, for example 4K instead of 720p in Demon’s Souls or [redacted].
• – Enable extra graphics options to support extra rendering features, such as custom anti-aliasing modes.

Continue reading Lead Graphics Developer kd-11 Is Joining Nekotekina’s Patreon

It finally happened! The PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 has launched one of the most iconic games on the platform: Demon’s Souls. Are you curious to know how it all happened? What the developers went through? Welcome to this first of hopefully many to come developer logs where we will now tell you everything.

It all began in our Discord channel where a user going by the nickname, Numan approached us with some interesting news. He claimed to have conducted a detailed investigation of what Demon’s Souls was trying to do when it was crashing one second after booting. He drew the conclusion that the game was trying to allocate memory pages of different sizes, access levels, and different attributes. When the game then tried to access a specific memory address, it crashed with an access violation. Consequently, these discoveries lead to a more accurate implementation of the function sys_memory_get_page_attribute() which was responsible for this particular crash. Suddenly the game booted up in RPCS3 for the first time ever and showed a loading animation!

Continue reading Progress Report: Demon’s Souls Nearly Playable and RPCS3 v0.0.2