PS3 emulator that can play some Sony games with high resolution output and support for external gaming controllers.
RPCS3 is a free and open source PlayStation 3 emulator that currently supports a nice selection of PS3 titles as well as homebrew applications originally created for jailbroken consoles.
The emulator has come a long way since its humble beginnings to become a pretty impressive team effort in developing support for a growing list of PS3 titles so that they may be played on a PC.
The stability of RPCS3 is usually pretty good, especially for some of the more well-known ROMs that have received additional attention from the development community.
Supports DS3 and DS4 controllers, or mouse and keyboard
As with most emulators of this type, the application has support for DualShock 3 and DualShock 4 controllers connected to the PC. It may work with other controllers depending on how the keys are mapped. Of course, if there's any issue with a game-pad, RPCS3 can also be used with keyboard and mouse.
In terms of playable ROMs, the program is generally used with game dumps of PS3 Blu-ray discs. This can be done on your own discs depending on what Blu-ray optical drive you have and whether it supports the types of discs the PS3 reads.
In terms of other features RPCS3 can import saved games from a console, install pkg files, install firmware and emulate the PowerPC CPU arrays that PlayStation 3 uses on an Intel x86_64 system that Windows PCs typically run.
Customize graphics
At the moment, only OpenGL is supported. You can modify aspect ratio of games, turn on framerate limiting, apply anisotropic filter, change game resolution and enable anti-aliasing depending on the graphics card.
Additional settings are GPU Texture Scaling, VSync, Stretch to Display Area, Write Color Buffers and Disable Vertex Cache. Resolution scale and scale threshold can be modified with a slider between minimum and maximum values.
Features of RPCS3
- API: Ability to access the PS3's system API.
- Audio: Accurate emulation of sound output.
- CPU: Robust x86-64 CPU emulation.
- Cheat: Ability to input cheat codes.
- Compatibility: High compatibility with a wide range of PlayStation 3 titles.
- Debugging: Comprehensive debugging tools for developers.
- GPU: High-performance Graphics Processing Unit emulation.
- Input: Emulation of various controllers and keyboard/mouse input.
- Logging: Ability to log game progress and system information.
- Modding: Allows for custom modding and patching.
- Network: Network support for online play.
- Storage: Support for virtual hard drive and disc imaging.
- UI: Modern, easy-to-use graphical user interface.
- Updating: Automatic updating of core components.
Compatibility and License
RPCS3 is provided under a freeware license on Windows from console emulators with no restrictions on usage. Download and installation of this PC software is free and 0.0.29 is the latest version last time we checked.
What version of Windows can RPCS3 run on?
RPCS3 can be used on a computer running Windows 11 or Windows 10. Previous versions of the OS shouldn't be a problem with Windows 8 and Windows 7 having been tested. It comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit downloads.
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