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Back in 2021, the RPCS3 devs lowered the emulator’s system requirements to embrace Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 (Terascale 2) series graphics cards. In the subsequent five years, the emulator has been tuned to improve performance on hardware from these generations. An example provided asserts that when using Persona 5 as a benchmark, performance in Kamoshida’s Castle went from 35 to 49 FPS between 2021 and today (on a PC system with an ATI Radeon HD 5850, AMD FX-8350 CPU, and 8GB of RAM).
Success spurred the devs to investigate TeraScale 1 performance and compatibility. Some OpenGL wrangling ensued due to TeraScale 1 GPUs only reporting OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.30 support, but getting these old and unloved ATI cards to work with the RPCS3 OpenGL renderer was surprisingly simple. It was done by overriding the reported OpenGL levels to 4.3 and 4.40.
Initial tests made use of a system packing an ATI Radeon HD 4890 with 1GB of VRAM – the most powerful Terascale 1 GPU ever sold. According to the RPCS3 blog, this card has a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but the emulator’s complex shader code is not optimal for older architectures like this. Nevertheless, “Simpler games work perfectly fine, with playable performance,” notes the blog, “while games that have more complex graphics are GPU bottlenecked with subpar performance.” Screenshots show Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Outrun Online Arcade with frame rates close to 60 FPS.
Moving down the stack and further back in time, GPUs like the ATI Radeon HD 3870 are “still able to render very simple games with playable performance in RPCS,” assert the devs. To achieve playability, you will want to dial in PSP-like resolutions, though. Specifically, 273p was mentioned.
Open-source PS3 emulator says it’s now compatible with over 75% of all PS3 games on PC
PS5 emulation ramps up in response to Sony killing physical games
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/playstation-3-emulator-adds-support-for-ati-radeon-hd-2000-3000-and-4000-series-graphics-cards-on-linux-20-year-old-hd-2600-crumbles-can-only-run-portal-at-13-fps-in-273p#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
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