Following the release of support for ARM64 devices, the popular PS3 emulator RCPS3 has come to the Raspberry Pi 5.
Discussing the announcement over on the official website, the RCPS3 team says that due to the Raspberry Pi 5 housing an ARM-based CPU and at least 8GB of RAM — the recommended amount of RAM needed to run the PS3 emulator — it made sense to try and get RCPS3 running on the device.
To get things running as smooth as possible, the team overclocked the Pi 5’s CPU to 2900MHz (+400MHz) and the GPU to 1060MHz (+100MHz).
“We started by trying to running games on the default Vulkan render, but this failed as the mesa v3dv driver for Broadcom GPUs is missing full textureCompressionBC support, due to hardware limitations.
“However, not all was lost, since the BC1-BC3 formats are supported, and that’s all that RPCS3 needs,” says the team.
Following a lot of trial and error, the team was able to get several games to a point where they were playable, although that does come with a few caveats.
For a start, the Pi 5 is “unbelievably weak,” which isn’t all that surprising given the low-cost nature of the device. It’s also much weaker than the original PS3’s CPU, so a fair bit of general wizardry and compromise was needed to get games up and running.
That compromise comes in the form of dropping the emulator’s resolution down to match that of the PSP’s 272p. Check in out the difference in the comparison below.
Obviously, I don’t think anyone was expecting the Raspberry Pi 5 to run the PS3 at fullspeed without any problems. But the fact it’s able to run some stuff at all is an impressive feat of engineering, and means game preservation isn’t being left in the dust as newer tech comes out. That’s a win as far as I’m concerned.
And if you’re wondering what PS3 looks like in action on the Pi 5, check out the video below.
