RPCS3 PlayStation 3 Emulator Receives AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Support

[Uskompuf]

RPCS3 is an open-source PlayStation 3 emulator which currently boasts compatibility with 61% of the 2278 games released for the console and limited compatibility with a further 31%. The developers behind the emulator have recently announced the addition of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support which they note is the first for any console emulator. This implementation performs the upscaling at the end of the graphics pipeline which may introduce issues on certain titles. The feature can be enabled within the settings menu under the GPU section and the sharpening strength can be adjusted from 1 - 100%.

RPCS3 is now the first game console emulator to support FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[sam_86314]

This is probably a perfect place to implement FSR since many emulators are very picky about resolution.

Some emulators, like RPCS3, are hit-and-miss when it comes to higher resolutions than what the console originally ran at. Other ones, like Yuzu, won't let you run at any other resolution.

 

[Chomiq]

It's still CPU bound anyway.

 

[The Quim Reaper]

Yeah, now you can examine those pixels in detail, when RPCS3 locks up & crashes, as it does every 5mins or so, even in games marked as 'fully playable'.

Its the complete randomness of the locks ups thats the most infuriating part of this emulator, its just as likely to crash in the first minute of gameplay as the 20th.

Without doubt, the flakiest, most unstable emulator out there.

 

[sam_86314]

Yeah, now you can examine those pixels in detail, when RPCS3 locks up & crashes, as it does every 5mins or so, even in games marked as 'fully playable'.

Its the complete randomness of the locks ups thats the most infuriating part of this emulator, its just as likely to crash in the first minute of gameplay as the 20th.

Without doubt, the flakiest, most unstable emulator out there.

Hasn't really been my experience with it, but you have to remember that the PS3 was probably the most excessively complex console ever made. Emulating it was (and still is) always going to be a challenge.

 

[londiste]

Yeah, now you can examine those pixels in detail, when RPCS3 locks up & crashes, as it does every 5mins or so, even in games marked as 'fully playable'.
Its the complete randomness of the locks ups thats the most infuriating part of this emulator, its just as likely to crash in the first minute of gameplay as the 20th.
Without doubt, the flakiest, most unstable emulator out there.

My experience has been largely the same and I do think they somewhat oversell the Fully Playable category. On the other hand, some of the instability can be mitigated by tweaking settings and many crashes are down to problems with heavy CPU usage even on fairly fast CPUs.

Also, RPCS3 is practically the most advanced console emulator out there. For the Xbox360 from same console generation Xenia does exist but that one is not in a usable state yet.The compute power required to emulate a different architecture like PS3's cell should not be underestimated. In addition to that basic complexity they also have had to figure out all the weird features and glitches. And performance optimizations have been relatively frequent as well.

 

[Chomiq]

Yeah, now you can examine those pixels in detail, when RPCS3 locks up & crashes, as it does every 5mins or so, even in games marked as 'fully playable'.

Its the complete randomness of the locks ups thats the most infuriating part of this emulator, its just as likely to crash in the first minute of gameplay as the 20th.

Without doubt, the flakiest, most unstable emulator out there.

Let me remind you something:
v0.0.17-12617 Alpha

They still have years of development ahead of them.

 

[kayjay010101]

Yeah, now you can examine those pixels in detail, when RPCS3 locks up & crashes, as it does every 5mins or so, even in games marked as 'fully playable'.

Its the complete randomness of the locks ups thats the most infuriating part of this emulator, its just as likely to crash in the first minute of gameplay as the 20th.

Experimental software is unstable, what a big surprise.

Without doubt, the flakiest, most unstable emulator out there.

For PS3? Doubt it.

 

[The Quim Reaper]

Let me remind you something:
v0.0.17-12617 Alpha

They still have years of development ahead of them.

Let me remind you that technically, every emulator ever released, is still in 'Alpha'.

Its just a way Emulator authors use to deflect criticism of the project.

I'm willing to bet that these lock ups will never go away because of the fundamental differences that exist in x86 Windows thread scheduling & PS3 Cell architecture. Its going to be like fitting a round peg in a square hole.

 

[Tartaros]

Its just a way Emulator authors use to deflect criticism of the project.

Maybe it's because it's the hardest platform to emulate?

Super Nintendo is still not fully 100% emulated, even if there have been emulators for it for 20+ years. Saturn is the same. They are both complicated hardware to emulate.

Now imagine the PS3 with the Cell. Good luck with that.

 

[Punkenjoy]

My first thought was, why this is probably limited by CPU anyway.

But my second tought was, it's probably lower resolution and you need to upscale it. And Implementing TAA upscaling is probably not an option. SO FSR is probably one of the best thing it can do.

But I wonder how it's going to handle text and UI.

 

[londiste]

RPCS3 running games on both native and larger resolutions is not that heavy on GPU. It is nicely capable of increasing the resolution from PS3s native with relatively small performance hit. And I am aware that my GPU is high enough on the ladder so I may be biased. Games are much much more CPU-bound there.

Either way, it is nice to see this stuff implemented anyway. One more cool feature or possibility to have.

 

[auxy]

The comments on this article are weird. You guys keep talking about this technology as if it's something that increases performance. People make the same mistake with DLSS. Both DLSS and FSR *REDUCE* performance. The only reason that they are marketed as increasing performance is because they are usually used along with a sharp reduction in render resolution, usually done silently by the game engine, which is misleading in my opinion.

Enabling FSR on RPCS3 isn't for the purpose of increasing performance. It's simply to improve the look of PlayStation 3 games, which generally run at sub-HD resolutions. All this talk about the emulator being CPU-limited is silly—of course it's CPU limited, but what's your point? This was never going to change or address that.

When you see FSR, you need to stop thinking "technology to improve performance" and start thinking "upscaling filter", because that's all it is. And the same thing is true of DLSS. It doesn't magically give you extra performance, it just tries to make a lower render resolution look as good as native.