Latest PlayStation 3 Emulation Looks Very Promising!

The PlayStation 3’s cell architecture is renowned for being overcomplicated which makes it extraordinarily difficult to emulate. Up to this point, there hasn’t really been any evidence of a working emulator and many people raised concerns about the graphical horsepower needed to play various games at a smooth frame-rate. However, the advent of DirectX 12, a low-level API has the potential to revolutionize hardware optimization and offer emulation of bizarre engineering solutions like the cell chip. YouTuber ‘John GodGames’ has released footage of an open source PlayStation 3 emulator using C++. The performance across various titles is surprisingly good and a huge step forward from anything we’ve seen before. Clearly, it’s in an early development stage and has a great deal of room for improvement.

During these videos, the emulation revolves around a fairly decent mid-high end setup including an Intel Core i7-6700K @4.6GHz, 16GB DDR4 memory and NVIDIA 970. This means it’s likely that a high specification will be necessary to play each game smoothly. Then again, as the programming improves, the technical requirements should reduce.

As with any emulation project, it will be interesting to see how Sony reacts and if they make any demands for the emulator to cease production. I really hope this doesn’t happen because the idea of trying out PlayStation 3 games on a PC with a high framerate is very appealing. Plus, it’s much easier to use legitimate game disks instead of pirating huge Blu-Ray ROMs.