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RPCS3

RPCS3 is an open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger written in C++,
developed for Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD

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 * RPCS3 Inside Look: A Deep-Dive into Hardware and Performance Scaling!
 * Progress Report: September 2019
 * Progress Report: August 2019
 * Progress Report: July 2019
 * New Demon’s Souls 60FPS+ patch


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Featured progress and development


RPCS3 INSIDE LOOK: A DEEP-DIVE INTO HARDWARE AND PERFORMANCE SCALING!

Hey everyone! Today we’re going to talk about something that’s a little
different than what you are used to in the progress reports. We’ll be going
in-depth on how certain hardware and software configurations could significantly
affect your performance in RPCS3.

There are several aspects that could make RPCS3 not perform as well as it
should, and memory speeds is one of them. In our case, memory performance will
be stressed by RPCS3 in several ways:

 1. Cell emulation: SPUs access to main memory goes through DMA. This is a
    beastly exercise to emulate all on its own.
 2. RSX emulation.

RSX memory operations fall into two major categories: Upload and Download.
Upload operations include transfer of textures, shaders, and shader data (vertex
buffers and other register configuration tables) from the host CPU to the host
GPU. This process is usually optimized by the GPU driver to occur asynchronously
and with heavy use of batching. It is bandwidth heavy, as the sets of data are
rather large and transport has to go through PCI-E. We do a lot to hide this
issue, and for the most part it works well, but if your memory is too slow or if
you are stuck on an older PCI-E revision, the transfer lag can have a huge
performance impact, especially if a GPU sync is required.

Download operations for instance include transfer of textures and arbitrary data
from the host GPU to the host CPU. This one has very serious implications on
performance because we can’t really hide the memory latency for the transfer
operation. Most of the time the memory in question will be accessed by Cell
without warning, which means we have to stop everything until the GPU has
processed the information we need, and then we read all that data back over
PCI-E all while our CPU thread is blocked. It is for this very reason that we
have the ‘buffer options’ disabled by default: to reduce the penalty of this
hard stop as most games might trample on older GPU-resident data without really
needing to read it back later, in which case we can just pretend nothing existed
for that memory block. This means that it’s also not advisable to run RPCS3 with
your GPU usage maxed out or close to it as your GPU will not be quick enough to
respond to these random synchronization requests. There is a lot of optimization
that could be done in this area however, with a very good predictor that can
guess with high accuracy whether or not a memory block will be accessed by the
CPU soon and start queueing up the GPU instructions before it happens.

Continue reading RPCS3 Inside Look: A Deep-Dive into Hardware and Performance
Scaling!

Posted on 21 August 202023 August 2020Author RPCS3Categories Inside Look


PROGRESS REPORT: SEPTEMBER 2019

Welcome to September’s Progress Report! Firstly, we’re aware that this report is
severely late and would like to apologise for the delay. RPCS3’s progress
reports are solely written by volunteers and most of our regular writers could
not contribute to this report due to personal commitments. Going forward, we are
actively looking at ways to streamline the report to allow us to publish them in
a timely manner. If you hate seeing RPCS3’s reports get delayed and would like
to contribute to them, please apply here.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during September and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly
reports on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-09-14)
Status update from Nekotekina (2019-09-25)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-09-30)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
CONCLUSION

After the large improvements in August, September featured a lull in testing
games as our regular testers were focused on testing various pull requests
opened during the month. Due to this, most categories only showed modest
changes. However, the Loadable category did decrease from 16 games down to just
14 games now.



On Git statistics, there have been 17640 lines of code added and 7957 removed
through 89 pull requests by 14 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: September 2019

Posted on 25 December 201912 January 2020Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


PROGRESS REPORT: AUGUST 2019

Welcome to August’s Progress Report! Firstly we would like to apologize for the
delay in publishing this report. RPCS3’s progress reports are solely written by
volunteers and a few of our regular writers could not contribute to this report
due to personal commitments. If you hate seeing RPCS3’s reports get delayed and
would like to contribute to them, please apply here.

If you thought July was a big month for RPCS3, then prepare yourself for this
progress report. This month saw 20 pull requests from eladash alone as he set a
goal to have all his work merged in RPCS3 before his conscription service began.
Not wanting to be outdone, Nekotekina and kd-11 also made a dozen pull requests
each improving various parts of the emulator. We’ve got a lot to go over so
let’s get straight into it!

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during August and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly
reports on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-08-16)
WIP Screenshots from kd-11 (2019-08-16)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-08-31)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS
MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
CONCLUSION

August saw a major change in the way games are counted in the compatibility
statistics with all online multiplayer games in the Intro category and below
being excluded. This was done to better represent the state of the emulator’s
progress as these titles did not work as the servers that they wish to connect
to no longer exist. Thus, even if RPCS3 becomes 100% complete, these games will
not work unless somebody sets up a private server and emulates the original
server accurately. These titles are still present in the compatibility list and
are represented with a lightning bolt symbol next to their title. While they
will still show up in all search queries, they will no longer be included in our
statistics to showcase a more accurate picture of RPCS3’s development.

Moving on to actual improvements, our testers finally picked up the slack from
the past few months and extensively tested the Ingame category which gave the
Playable category its largest increase of the year. Every other category saw
large decreases with Ingame shedding 88 games and Intro and Loadable recorded
one of their largest drops ever percentage wise with drops of 17% and 20%
respectively. An effort was also made to merge duplicated titles in the
compatibility list which also aided the drop in these categories. As mentioned
in the previous month’s progress report, the Nothing category doubled in size to
4 games due to erroneous tests, but this has since been fixed bringing the
category back down to 2 games.



On Git statistics, there have been 8536 lines of code added and 5418 removed
through 71 pull requests by 15 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: August 2019

Posted on 9 October 201912 January 2020Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


PROGRESS REPORT: JULY 2019

Welcome to July’s Progress Report! Firstly we would like to apologise for the
delay in publishing this report. RPCS3’s progress reports are solely written by
volunteers and a few of our regular writers could not contribute to this report
due to personal commitments. If you hate seeing RPCS3’s reports get delayed and
would like to contribute to them, please apply here.

July was an absolute whirlwind of development that saw 60 pull requests merged
from both our regular developers as well new contributors. That’s almost 2 pull
requests merged everyday! This month, Nekotekina focused on improving TSX
performance while kd-11 implemented a second round of bug-fixes that improved
multiple AAA titles. On the other hand, eladash ironed out new features to help
games go beyond their existing framerate caps and GalCiv implemented microphone
support to finally allow RPCS3 to better emulate SingStar and other similar
titles. Ohh and let’s not forget the surprise progress made with Metal Gear
Solid 4 as well! There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump straight into it.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during July and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly reports
on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-07-10)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-07-23)
Status update from Nekotekina (2019-07-31)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
CONCLUSION

For the compatibility list, it was another quiet month as testers were
predominantly occupied with testing pull requests before they were merged. The
Playable category remained the largest, while the Ingame category showed a small
increase. A similar decrease can be seen in the Intro and Loadable categories,
dropping the Loadable category to an all-time low of just 20 titles. Finally,
the Nothing category doubled in size to 4 games, although it should be noted
this was possibly due to an inaccurate report from a tester, which is to be
corrected soon.



On Git statistics, there have been 7396 lines of code added and 3334 removed
through 60 pull requests by 15 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: July 2019

Posted on 9 September 20199 October 2019Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


NEW DEMON’S SOULS 60FPS+ PATCH

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

Posted on 12 August 201917 February 2020Author RPCS3Categories Uncategorized


PROGRESS REPORT: JUNE 2019

Welcome to June’s Progress Report! This month saw a wide variety of… bzzzt we
interrupt this broadcast for an important announcement!

RPCS3’s progress reports are written solely by volunteers and we’re looking for
more dedicated writers to help us write them. If you have the knowledge, time
and are willing to help, please apply here. And secondly, we have recently added
functionality that makes it possible to unlock the framerate limit of many
games. While this exciting new feature doesn’t work on every game, some big
titles such as Uncharted 1-3, The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption and more are
able to go over their framerate cap of 30FPS for the first time! We require the
help of the community to submit test results for as many games as possible to
determine the effectiveness of the feature. For more details, please click here.

Now back to our regular coverage! This month saw a wide variety of important
contributions from both lead developers, Nekotekina and kd-11 as well as many of
our usual contributors. June also marked an important milestone in compatibility
for the emulator as shown below. In this report, we’ll be going over the
implementation of native MSAA in RPCS3 and mutli-threaded RSX workload support,
as well as improvements to PPU scheduling and a significant overhaul to the
DevOps environment.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during June and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly reports
on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-06-10)
Status update from Nekotekina (2019-06-24)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-06-25)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
UPCOMING
CONCLUSION

Although June was a slow month for compatibility improvements due to our testers
taking a break, it did quietly mark the monumental milestone of the Playable
category finally becoming the largest category in our compatibility list! This
came to fruition from years of development, testing and re-working to ensure a
perfect balance of accuracy and performance to emulate the PlayStation 3. While
there is still much to be done, the momentum from these milestones continue to
accelerate development. In addition to this, the Intro and Loadable categories
decreased due to a few games being moved to Ingame or Playable for the first
time. The Ingame category also saw a net decrease due to further maintenance
done by merging duplicate game entries. This culminated into our second
milestone, where the combined percentage of the Loadable and Nothing categories
dropped below 1% for the very first time!




On Git statistics, there have been 24284 lines of code added and 14514 removed
through 42 pull requests by 12 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: June 2019

Posted on 31 July 201912 August 2019Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


PROGRESS REPORT: MAY 2019

Welcome to May’s Progress Report! Firstly we would like to apologise for the
delay in publishing this report. RPCS3’s progress reports are solely written by
volunteers and a few of our regular writers could not contribute to this report
due to personal commitments. If you hate seeing RPCS3’s reports get delayed and
would like to contribute to them, please apply here.

This month saw some major leaps by Nekotekina and kd-11 on the SPU and RSX
fronts. Nekotekina implemented SPU PIC support while kd-11 improved the surface
cache implementation. Meanwhile, Megamouse made multiple improvements to the UI,
GalCiv overhauled the DualShock 3 pad handler and ruipin tackled regressions in
the SPU LLVM backend when using Mega SPU block size.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during May and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly reports
on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-05-09)
Status update from Nekotekina (2019-05-14)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-05-27)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
CONCLUSION

This month RPCS3 reached one of the most significant milestones in game
compatibility. After intensive testing and merging of duplicates, as mentioned
in the previous month’s report, the Playable category has tied with the Ingame
category at 43.71%. RPCS3 has surely come a long way to have the Playable
category stand on the cusp of overtaking the Ingame category. On the other hand,
Intro section saw a modest drop while the number of Loadable and Nothing games
remained unchanged. For a more detailed look, you can view the compatibility
history page to see exactly which games had their status changed this month.




On Git statistics, there have been 9391 lines of code added and 5430 removed
through 45 pull requests by 12 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: May 2019

Posted on 9 July 201911 August 2019Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


PROGRESS REPORT: APRIL 2019

Welcome to April’s Progress Report! Firstly we would like to apologise for the
delay in publishing this report. RPCS3’s progress reports are solely written by
volunteers and a few of our regular writers could not contribute to this report
due to personal commitments. If you hate seeing RPCS3’s reports get delayed and
would like to contribute to them, please apply here.

This has been a very busy month, which saw many contributions from our regular
developers and even a few newcomers. Major improvements have been made to RSX
emulation by kd-11, fixing the texture cache and improving on the shader
decompiler. Meanwhile, eladash in his usual style, fixed a multitude of bugs
relating to savedata handling and the PPU/SPU interpreters/recompilers. Numan
(Inviuz) implemented a fringe syscall needed for Metal Gear Solid 4 to boot and
Nekotekina squeezed quite a bit more performance out of the SPU LLVM path. To
also improve the visual aspect of the emulator drysalter created two beautiful
new themes and lastly GalCiv expanded DualShock 3 Support to Linux. These and
many more improvements have all contributed to making RPCS3 both a better piece
of software and a better emulator, moving a bunch of new games into the Playable
category.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during April and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly
reports on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-04-07)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-04-23)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
CONCLUSION

This month RPCS3 reached another milestone in game compatibility. It’s the first
time that the Playable category surpasses 40%! As a result, the Ingame and Intro
categories see an equivalent, while the Loadable category goes down to 29 games.
We are also gearing up to undertake further maintenance to the compatibility
list by identifying and merging duplicate entries in the coming months! For a
more detailed look, you can view the compatibility history page to see exactly
which games had their status changed this month.




On Git statistics, there have been 9921 lines of code added and 2967 removed
through 113 commits by 16 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: April 2019

Posted on 16 June 201917 September 2019Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


PROGRESS REPORT: MARCH 2019

Welcome to March’s Progress Report! If you were left wanting more after last
month’s report, then your wait is over. March saw massive strides in all facets
of the emulator as multiple work-in-progress pull requests from our regular
developers were finally completed and merged. To start things off, Nekotekina
implemented a new LLVM-based SPU interpreter, updated the LLVM submodule to
version 9 and fixed the “Out of memory” errors faced by some games. On the other
hand, kd-11 continued his mission to improve the RSX texture handling which
fixed issues faced in over two dozen titles while GalCiv implemented native
support for the DualShock 3. Finally, elad335 made a host of improvements to
various core components improving performance and accuracy in an assortment of
titles, most notably God of War 3, when running on Windows.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during March and upcoming contributions can be found in their weekly
reports on Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-03-02)
Status update from Nekotekina (2019-03-05)
Status update from kd-11 (2019-03-18)
Status update from Nekotekina (2019-03-30)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
CONCLUSION

This month saw more maintenance work done to the compatibility list where
duplicate game IDs for the same game were merged into one single entry. A grand
total of 118 threads were merged allowing for a fairer representation of RPCS3’s
compatibility at this time. Adding to this, our community of testers continued
their efforts in acquiring and testing obscure titles that had not been tested
recently. The results of this revealed that many of the titles in the Ingame and
Intro categories were now indeed Playable and moved according. Thanks to the
dual effect of both efforts, the Playable category saw a marginal increase while
the Ingame and Intro categories saw a sharp decrease in total number of games
listed. Finally, thanks to elad335’s improvements to sys_vm, Doom 3: BFG Edition
moved from Nothing category straight into the Playable category, leaving just
two more titles in the Nothing category! For a more detailed look, you can view
the compatibility history page to see exactly which games had their status
changed this month.




On Git statistics, there have been 6331 lines of code added and 2573 removed
through 105 commits by 9 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: March 2019

Posted on 5 May 201911 August 2019Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress Report


PROGRESS REPORT: FEBRUARY 2019

Welcome to February’s Progress Report! This month saw smaller number of
contributions from our regular developers as most of the improvements were still
a work-in-progress that required further tweaking before they could be merged in
the upcoming months. That’s not to say this February didn’t have big
improvements though. On the contrary, this month kd-11 finally implemented the
much anticipated On-Screen Keyboard while GalCiv managed to emulate multiple
PlayStation 3 accessories using regular controllers. If that wasn’t enough,
thanks to the multiple other performance improvements to the emulator, exclusive
titles such as Genji: Days of the Blade have seen a huge uplift in performance.

In addition to the following report, further details of Nekotekina and kd-11’s
work during February and upcoming contributions can be found in their reports on
Patreon. This month’s Patreon reports are:

Status update from kd-11 (2019-02-08)


TABLE OF CONTENTS


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
GAMES
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
UPCOMING
CONCLUSION

This month saw RPCS3 reach another milestone in game compatibility with the
Ingame and Playable categories cumulatively crossing 85%! This was largely
thanks to the conscious efforts of testers to retest all games in Intro,
Loadable and Nothing categories and report issues faced to the developers. Once
provided relevant causes, our developers were able to fix issues plaguing many
of these titles. Their efforts paid off with the Intro category decreasing by 66
titles. But this is just the beginning, with further work being done to improve
these titles.




On Git statistics, there have been 2209 lines of code added and 447 removed
through 21 pull requests by 9 authors.
Continue reading Progress Report: February 2019

Posted on 4 April 201911 August 2019Author RPCS3Categories Monthly Progress
Report


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