PS3 emulator coming, renders PS3 games at up to 10K res

Some of my best gaming memories have been on older consoles, with plenty of hours pumped into the PS3 over the years. Now we have RPCS3, a new open source PS3 emulator that will render your favorite games at up to 10K.

The performance of the PS3 emulator is said to be great, but you'll need a graphics card that supports Vulkan. The developers have also added anistrophic filtering and have plans to add anti-aliasing, texture scaling, and even game-specific patches in the near future. The video above does an amazing job at convincing you if you had any doubts, which all of mine were squished as soon as I was 30 seconds into the clip.

Seeing games like Demon Souls running at 4K, and even games like Yakuza and titles I've never even heard of with Ni No Kuni and Catherine looking absolutely stunning once they were run with the emulator at 4K. The team explains: "The video showcases various popular titles with a side-by-side comparison from 720p (native PS3 resolution) to 4K rendering with 16x anisotropic filtering in RPCS3. The difference is quite incredible in titles that have high quality assets. There is a lot of detail that just wasn't visible at 720p. This feature is available for every PlayStation 3 game running on RPCS3. The only exception being that it does not yet work with Strict Rendering Mode. Games that require this setting will have to wait a bit longer before they can benefit from high resolution rendering".

The team have explained the performance side of RPCS3, where they said: "Rendering a game in high resolutions such as 4K, while beautiful, is quite taxing on your hardware and there is often a massive hit in performance. However, since most of the workload for RPCS3 is on the CPU and GPU usage is low, there is a lot of untapped performance just waiting to be used. All processing is done CPU side, and as far as the GPU is concerned it is simply rendering 2006 era graphics (yes, the PS3 is 11 years old now). We're happy to report that anyone with a dedicated graphics card that has Vulkan support can expect identical performance at 4K".

But it's this part that gives me goosebumps: "High resolution rendering is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving graphics quality. In the future, we will see custom anti-aliasing, texture scaling algorithms, and maybe even game specific patches by the community. Of course, work also continues with improving the emulator accuracy and general performance to enable more games to run, and to run well. If you like in-depth technical reports, early access to information, or you simply want to contribute, consider becoming a patron! All donations are greatly appreciated. As of last month, RPCS3 now has two full-time coders that greatly benefit from the continued support of over 600 generous patrons".

You can support RPCS3 on their Patreon right here.