RPCS3 PlayStation 3 Emulator Adds Ryzen 9000 Support For Smooth Retro Gaming On Zen 5

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You probably think of 8-bit and 16-bit games as “retro”, but the PlayStation 3 is old enough to vote, and that also makes it “retro” to plenty of adults right now. On the other hand, if you read that headline and the part that confused you was “Adds Ryzen 9000 Support,” then let us explain.
The PlayStation 3 is an exceedingly difficult machine to emulate. It’s not the fact that it uses a PowerPC CPU; translating PowerPC to x86-64 is pretty straightforward. The problem is that its Cell processor has a unique design with seven “Synergistic Processing Elements” (SPEs) that are kind of between full cores and something like a modern CPU’s vector units. Games make varying use of the SPEs, but they have functions that are difficult to replicate at full speed even on modern x86-64 and ARM CPUs.

These challenges are why RPCS3 has become an incredibly optimized piece of software, and it achieves this through a lengthy pre-compilation stage that occurs the first time you launch a game in the emulator. During this process, the emulator compiles the CELL code to specifically target your CPU architecture, ensuring the best performance, as it makes use of all of your CPU’s performance-enhancing features.

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If RPCS3 doesn’t know what your CPU is, it will instead attempt to compile the PS3 software to a generic target that it thinks will work on your hardware, but this can result in poor performance as well as stability issues. That’s why RPCS3 had to be updated for the new AMD Zen 5-based processors—it’s not that they’re somehow less capable than the previous-generation chips, it’s just that the software didn’t recognize them, so it was spitting out crappy converted code.
god of war 3
God of War 3, like Red Dead Redemption (top), is one of the most demanding PS3 games to emulate…
In actual fact, after the patch to make the emulator recognize AMD’s new chips, RPCS3 runs extremely well on Zen 5 thanks to improvements in the architecture’s support for AVX-512 instructions. Zen 4 was already a very capable platform for PlayStation 3 emulation—every PS3 game will run just fine on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D—but Zen 5 has significant optimizations to its SIMD units that nearly double the floating-point throughput when using certain instructions, and these could help RPCS3 a bit on top of the architecture’s general performance uplift.
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… but it runs beautifully on Zen 4 CPUs, even at high frame rates.

That can still be helpful when you’re trying to run games with frame-rate unlock patches or resolution scaling hacks—albeit that the latter is more of a GPU thing, than CPU. Still, many effects are done on the CPU, and every little bit of single-threaded performance counts. If you’re keen to do some PS3 emulation, you won’t find many better options than one of AMD’s brand-new CPUs when they launch tomorrow.

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