RPCS3 Takes Huge Step Towards Full PS3 Playability In Major Update

Over on X/Twitter, the developers of the cross-platform PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 have touted a key compatibility milestone, with 98% of PS3 titles playable on the emulator in some form and an impressive 73% playable to completion. Of the remaining 62 games (1.74%) that aren't playable—games that simply crash before entering gameplay—46 are PlayStation Move games tied to Sony's long-forgotten motion controllers.

The rest of the titles are also largely niche, with all the most critically-acclaimed PlayStation 3 titles long made playable via RPCS3 and enhanced via PC emulation features, including "RPCN", which keeps netplay functionality intact for online-enabled PS3 games that are no longer playable on Sony's official servers. It's a staggering achievement for emulation enthusiasts and game preservation in general, and marks RPCS3's impressive rise as a leading modern emulator despite being built around such strangely-specialized console hardware.


It's been a great time for RPCS3. In just the past two years, the team behind the emulator has successfully managed to port the app to 64-bit Arm platforms and optimize its performance to the point where the PlayStation 3 can feasibly be emulated on smartphones and low-power handhelds like Steam Deck. Just as "Rome wasn't built in a day," it took a long time for RPCS3 to reach this level of compatibility and performance, but the rate of improvements have pushed RPCS3 devs right up there with the Dolphin Emulator team. The PlayStation 3's highly-specialized Cell processor was a nightmare for the console's original developers and was fairly considered difficult-to-impossible to emulate on PC, but 19 years later, modern hardware support for vector extensions and good old-fashioned programmer ingenuity have preserved and enhanced nearly the entire library.

Per the original X/Twitter post, while this milestone is excellent, there's still work to be done. Those 62 games left unplayable are a meaningful portion of the PlayStation 3 library, particularly for those who share nostalgia for PlayStation Move titles and that generation's experimentation with motion controls ahead of PC VR setting new standards. It's truly impressive just how much the RPCS3 team has narrowed things down, though, and at the rate we're going, we wouldn't be surprised to see RPCS3 reach 100% playability in the next few years. All the most technically-impressive titles, like Metal Gear Solid 4, have been playable for a long while, so now it's just the more exotic releases that require the developers' attention.