RPCS3 is a multi-platform open-source PlayStation 3 emulator
Download the latest build here:
Check the game compatibility list:
Donate to support our developers:
Join our Discord:
We are delighted to announce that as of today, the RPCS3 Loadable compatibility category has reached 0 GAMES!
This means there are no PS3 games left that boot to a black screen on the emulator - every PS3 game at the very least boots and shows image output.
Happy holidays!
We're delighted to announce that RPCS3 now has a total of ZERO games in the Nothing status!
This means that all known games and applications at least boot on the emulator, with no on-going regressions that prevent games from booting.
We look forward to emptying out Loadable too!
We have big news for Gran Turismo fans:
GT games are now very stable on RPCS3!
While they can't be considered Playable yet due to some graphical and performance issues, you can now have a good experience if you have a good PC and follow the wiki page for the games.
For the past few years, GalCiv has been hard at work improving RPCN, allowing for many more PS3 games to be played online.
You can even add friends to your RPCN account and invite them into online matches in the same way you would on PSN with a real PS3!
RPCS3 is now 10 years old!
The repository for the project was created on May 23rd, 2011
Thanks to the hard work of hundreds of people, most PlayStation 3 games are now Playable on PC - once thought to be impossible to achieve due to PS3's bizarre architecture
DH, RPCS3's founder, has given permission to share this quick progress update of his PlayStation 4 emulator.
The RPCS4 emulator is being worked on by DH, who worked on RPCS3 from 2011 to 2016, there is no overlap from the RPCS3 Team, which will continue to work on RPCS3.
Game initial loading times have been greatly improved, as the "Applying PPU Code" stage has been replaced by an almost instantaneous function, starting on RPCS3 v0.0.31-16208
The amount of Loadable games on our Compatibility List is now back to 0!
A bug in PPUThread found in a demo reported Loadable earlier this year has been fixed, moving 'Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Demo' to Ingame
Fixed by elad335 on Pull Request
#13966
(0.0.28-15141)
RPCS3 v0.0.31 has been tagged
Since v0.0.30 was tagged:
> 254 new commits
> 325 source code files have been edited
> 24 555 lines of code were added and 12 301 deleted
> 16 code contributors
> 62 days of development
You can now navigate the GUI's main window with a controller, starting on RPCS3 v0.0.30-16132
This is useful if you have a handheld PC such as the Steam Deck, as it allows for faster navigation of the game list
Hello
@GooglePlay
There's an obvious fraudulent app on Play Store using the name of our free, open-source software to attract downloads, already at over 10K downloads
We've already used the report form but they are being ignored
Is there a problem with the reports on your side?
It's now possible to hit 60 FPS on the initial area of RDR, the famous benchmark spot, without any mods.
This was achieved with 12900K 5.3GHz / 5.0 Ring, 32GB 6200C30 DDR5 and RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra, running on Clear Linux.
The previous record was 52 FPS with an 11900K at 5.4GHz.
Misleading headline, you can run the game on both RPCS3 (PS3) and Xenia (X360) emulators and that won't change, what has been halted was a game enhancement project through modding
Game is not yet Playable on both emulators but progress has been steady since it first went Ingame
Wondering how 2023 is going so far with regards to furthering technological innovation and PS3 preservation through emulation?
Here's a performance comparison between a February build and a recent August build, using a Ryzen 7 5700X CPU in God of War III!
Support for playing with midi drums was implemented starting on RPCS3 v0.0.30-16095
You can now play games like Rock Band 3 using your midi based drums peripheral, without a midi pro adapter!
Configure your peripheral on Settings > I/O > Emulated MIDI Device
For those interested in technical details about RPCS3!
Whatcookie, one of our developers, has produced a video which goes into detail on various features of the PS3 hardware, and how RPCS3 is able to efficiently emulate these features at a high speed.
In this new showcase we go over some of the notable changes to RPCS3 over the last two years.
Most of the changes shown were made by kd-11. There's a lot of exciting changes that you may not be aware of!
Improvements to power efficiency were merged, allowing for a lower CPU power draw and higher performance, for systems with at least 8 threads on Linux or 12 threads on Windows - starting on RPCS3 v0.0.29-15441
13900K comparisons with framerate and CPU power draw included below
Improvements to GPU performance on weaker hardware were added on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15302
This change can result in a massive speedup in games such as GT series on smaller GPUs without super-fast GDDR6X memory, but there are diminishing returns on the highest end stuff (e.g RTX 4090)
Emulator savestates have been greatly improved this month thanks to EladAsh:
- There's now a visible progress bar whenever the emulator is creating a savestate;
- Savestate compatibility has been greatly improved, with many bugs fixed;
- Saving and loading states is faster now.
100 000 subscribers!
We'd like to thank everyone for watching our update videos and also for subscribing to our YouTube channel at
Today we become the first emulator team to have an official YouTube channel reach the 100K subscribers milestone 🎉
We are currently developing a PhD thesis on forwards compatibility on PlayStation video game consoles
Through this research, we will enable PlayStation 4 games to run directly on the PlayStation 3 architecture
Initial results show great potential for forwards compatibility tech
RPCS3 v0.0.30 has been tagged
Since v0.0.29 was tagged:
> 490 new commits
> 565 source code files have been edited
> 32 452 lines of code were added and 12 759 deleted
> 16 code contributors
> 155 days of development
After further sys_uart work by Vestrel, RPCS3 now supports HDMI on VSH/XMB.
This means you can now select 'Yes' on the HDMI prompt and first boot the PS3 menu with 1080p resolution, as opposed to having to select 'No' and manually configuring component 1080p on display settings.
Disappointed by the recently released PC port of the PlayStation 3 game Ninja Gaiden Σ?
RPCS3 has got you covered:
☑️ Keyboard and mouse support
☑️ Controller remapping
☑️ Rendering resolutions up to 8K
☑️ Anisotropic filtering up to 16X
☑️ Windows, Linux, FreeBSD
... and more!
One of our Steam Deck retail units has finally arrived!
Do you already have a Steam Deck? What games have you already tried or plan to try on RPCS3?
@OnDeck
Hello hardware reviewers 👋
Please note that RPCS3 does not yet enable AVX-512 code paths for the brand new Zen 4 CPUs out of the box.
It can be enabled manually at the moment with a workaround, but we will make it work with AVX-512 out of the box later today.
Happy new year everyone!
After years of hard work from several developers, we're excited to announce that the VirtualShell/XrossMediaBar (VSH/XMB) now boots in the master build while using the latest PS3 firmware version!
Pull Request 13077 (v0.0.26-14684) by kd-11, which fixed a bug causing inconsistent frametimes in MGS4, also fixes some graphical corruption issues in games like GTA V, as seen in the comparison below
The fixes were achieved by improving surface and texture cache communication
RPCS3 v0.0.28 has been tagged
Since v0.0.27 was tagged:
> 329 new commits
> 424 source code files have been edited
> 18 492 lines of code were added and 6 755 deleted
> 16 code contributors
> 93 days of development
RPCS3 v0.0.29 has been tagged
Since v0.0.28 was tagged:
> 307 new commits
> 369 source code files have been edited
> 13 909 lines of code were added and 10 234 deleted
> 17 code contributors
> 59 days of development
RPCS3 v0.0.32 has been tagged
Since v0.0.31 was tagged:
> 232 new commits
> 265 source code files have been edited
> 9 149 lines of code were added and 4 850 deleted
> 14 code contributors
> 58 days of development
⚠️ Attention Windows 7/8/8.1 users!
We will soon finally drop support for these EOL OSes, following many other emulators and applications that already have
If you don't want to use newer versions of Windows, you can upgrade to 🐧 Linux to continue using the latest RPCS3 builds
Do not miss tomorrow's talk regarding PS3 emulation!
"PlayStation 3 Emulation: (Re)implementing the impossible"
Feb 6th at 12h CET (3h PT, 6h ET, 11h UTC, 20h JST)
The speaker is
@AlexAltea
, former RPCS3 lead developer and Orbital's lead developer
GalCiv has been hard at work on RPCN - a PSN matchmaking re-implementation for RPCS3 - and after weeks of hard work we're excited to announce that..
You can now play "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle" online against anyone in ZA WARUDO!!
We now have over 300 000 members on our Discord server - currently the biggest emulation related server out there!
We'd like to thank everyone that follows our project, and for those who still don't, you can join our server at
Are you looking for some console exclusive games to test on low powered PCs such as the Steam Deck?
Here are a few recommendations:
- Asura's Wrath
- Demon's Souls
- Drakengard 3
- Lost in the rain
* Screenshots from 45W mobile Zen 3 4C/8T at 4.4GHz and integrated Renoir iGPU
Build 0.0.24-14350 fixes RSX clear color for formats with less than 32-bit width.
This fixes graphical issues in some games such as broken night shadows in Midnight Club: Los Angeles.
Over the past few months RPCS3 has seen major performance improvements due to kd-11 and Nekotekina's RSX & SPU optimisations. Metal Gear Solid in particular saw a huge performance uplift.
Check out the showcase below:
RPCS3 v0.0.20 has been tagged
Since v0.0.19 was tagged:
> 167 new commits
> 263 source code files have been edited
> 11 083 lines of code were added and 7 113 deleted
> 23 code contributors
> 61 days of development
Did you know that you can play PS3 Games on your Nintendo Switch thanks to RPCS3, the Android Switch port and streaming software?
On image: Laptop with i7-7820HQ and Quadro M2200 streaming through Steam In-Home (can't use Moonlight because Quadro GPU, but would be better)
Thanks to kd-11, we have implemented accurate ZCULL statistics counting, simulating the exact same behaviour as the RSX on a real PS3.
This has fixed graphical issues on many games, including the sun's incorrect flare effect on Demon's Souls.
You can now assign multiple keys/buttons to the same virtual buttons starting on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15208
On Pad Settings, you can do this by pressing Shift while clicking on the input assignation button
An AVX-512 optimisation for the translation of the SPU instruction CFLTU has been added - this means that for every CFLTU, the emulator now generates only 3 PC native instructions when AVX-512 is present on the user's CPU, instead of 6 - starting on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15409
RPCS3's highly anticipated macOS release is now available now for download! 🎉
Huge thanks to all the developers who worked hard on getting this into a good state recently, and all the former developers who worked on making this a reality!
We are expanding the RPCS3 minimum requirements, adding support for AMD Northern Islands (HD 6000) and Evergreen (HD 5000) architectures!
Note: It's highly recommended you use them with Linux if you want a good experience because the Windows AMD OpenGL driver is slow and broken.
After a lot of work from elad335 and much testing from the community, we're thrilled to announce that RPCS3 now supports savestates!
Read this wiki page to learn all about savestates on RPCS3:
RPCS3 v0.0.22 has been tagged
Since v0.0.21 was tagged:
> 209 new commits
> 350 source code files have been edited
> 20 334 lines of code were added and 7 852 deleted
> 21 code contributors
> 61 days of development
An option to automatically pause emulation when the emulator window is not focused was added in the "Emulator" tab of the settings window on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15314
This allows for lower CPU usage when multi-tasking, thus lower power consumption as well
Build 0.0.24-14209 implements an optimization in the AVX-512 code for Zen4 CPUs, thanks to AMD's 1 uop implementation of VPERMI2B/VPERMT2B.
Previous implementation in RPCS3 was not using these instructions as they take 3 uop in Intel CPUs, so we had a custom 2 uop implementation.
The asynchronous texture streaming functionality has been rewritten to be fully compliant with the Vulkan specification.
You can now use it with up-to-date NVIDIA Vulkan drivers from RPCS3 0.0.20-13279 and on!
(The previous code only worked on AMD and old NVIDIA drivers)
RPCS3 is a PlayStation 3 emulator for Windows, Linux and BSD.
Thanks to all the work poured into it since development began in 2011, today RPCS3 is dubbed one of the most complex video game console emulators of all time.
Currently almost half of PS3's game catalog is Playable.
RPCS3 v0.0.19 has been tagged
Since v0.0.18 was tagged:
> 272 new commits
> 330 source code files have been edited
> 19 149 lines of code were added and 6 673 deleted
> 16 code contributors
> 61 days of development
If you're testing RPCS3 on Steam Deck / Linux with RADV:
- On Settings > Advanced > GPU, enable "Disable native float16 support";
- If you're using ZCull Accuracy > Relaxed and you see flickering graphics, try going back to Approximate/Precise.
We have updated our minimum OS requirements for running RPCS3:
- 🪟 Windows 10, Windows 11
- 🐧 Linux 5.4 (Older LTS), Ubuntu 20.04 or newer
- 🍎 macOS Monterey 12.0 or newer
- 😈 FreeBSD 12.4 or newer
Make sure to always keep your OS up-to-date for the best experience
For those who are wondering whether RPCS3 will run on Steam Deck / Steam OS 3.0 - Yes!
It's based on Arch Linux, which we have supported for a long time
However, Steam Deck's hardware is quite below RPCS3's recommended requirements, so keep your performance expectations in check
A performance issue with PS3 games that spam occlusion queries quite a lot, and that can end up generating hundreds of these per frame, has been fixed on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15211
This fixes NVIDIA performance when running 'Spiderman: Web of Shadows', for example
Did you know that Gran Turismo 5 has head tracking functionality?
No? You can now try it out on RPCS3, as the head tracking functionality is now working!
All you need is the emulator, the game, and a camera.
Have fun!
An issue with invalid surface color mask writes that are ignored on console but were not by RPCS3 has been fixed - starting on RPCS3 v0.0.29-15526
This fixes graphical issues with several games, including Pixar games, SingStar, Nascar: Inside Line, Go! Sports Ski, and others
We have added support for DualSense Edge starting on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15176
If you happen to have one of those, you can now use it by selecting "DualSense" in Pad Settings
You may have heard RPCS3 brought up as an example of consumer software that can take advantage of AVX-512. In this blog post, Whatcookie covers why exactly the new instructions and features introduced in the AVX-512 family are so useful for PS3 emulation.
macOS builds of RPCS3 have now been re-enabled after a period of build scripts maintenance
You can download RPCS3 for macOS at
We also dropped support for macOS 11.6, the minimum supported version is now 12.0
Time to also loop
@TeamYouTube
since we're also on YouTube with over 10 million views
Android users see videos on YouTube for our software for PCs, search it on Play Store and end up downloading the fraudulent app
Why is Google's ToS not enforced? Why do reports not work?
RPCS3 v0.0.23 has been tagged
Since v0.0.22 was tagged:
> 298 new commits
> 360 source code files have been edited
> 27 174 lines of code were added and 7 839 deleted
> 22 code contributors
> 62 days of development
In today's video, Whatcookie explains the logic behind some of his framerate unlock patches, going over different patching techniques which depend on how a game's engine locks framerate.
DualSense controllers are now fully supported in RPCS3 thanks to lbfs and Megamouse's contributions.
Games that require SIXAXIS controls (PlayStation gyroscope) can be played with either a DualShock 3, DualShock 4 and as of today with a DualSense controller as well.
Savestate compression was implemented starting on RPCS3 v0.0.29-15753
This allows for storage gains that are usually above 50% in savestate sizes, which can range from a few hundred MBs to few GBs
Thanks to elad335, we have fixed a longstanding RSX bug on RPCS3 regarding SNORM16 vertex decoding
This fixes missing graphs on certain objects on Demon's Souls
Note that you need to clear your shader cache in order to generate fixed shaders
This fix is available on v0.0.23-14001
You can now download existing game patches from inside RPCS3 with only the click of a button.
Go to Manage -> Game Patches and click "Download latest patches" whenever you want to update your local patch database.
USIO emulation has been improved, allowing arcade games Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Dragon Ball: Zenkai Battle to work starting on RPCS3 v0.0.28-15385
They join Taiko no Tatsujin series as the 3 Namco System arcade games which work under the current RPCS3 USIO implementation
Applying PPU code step was visibly added in the UI starting on RPCS3 v0.0.29-15765
This removes the mysterious pause without any visible indication of the work being done during game boot after "Linking PPU Modules"
It has been found that one of the links on Sony's PS3 software update page is linking to Shop firmware instead of Retail, which causes issues in RPCS3.
The incorrect link is under 'How to reinstall PS3 console system software'.
The correct link is under 'Update using a computer.
We've fixed the issue where the AppImage build of the emulator would not run under game mode (gamescope) on a Steam Deck OLED, fix available starting on RPCS3 v0.0.31-16199
Do you know what is AVX-512 and why is it so useful for PS3 emulation?
In this blog post from 2022, Whatcookie goes over the uses and advantages of AVX-512 for RPCS3
Does your CPU support AVX-512?
Intel: 11th gen, early 12th gen units
AMD: Zen 4
Recently, kd-11 fixed broken lighting in many Insomniac games, and dynamic shadows in Naughty Dog games and a few others.
Aphelion put together a video showcase of these changes as well as some new patches for the Ratchet & Clank games, take a look!
If you are using an Alder Lake (Intel 12th Gen) CPU with RPCS3, make sure you disable the little cores, otherwise you're leaving a lot of performance on the table.
With disabled E-cores you get AVX-512 and higher ring ratio.
ADL's performance is by far the best of any CPU arch.
As "Surf's Up" got moved from Loadable to Playable in April, there are only 4 remaining games on the Loadable section of our Compatibility List
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 (EU Demo)
- Twisted Land: Shadow Town
- WALL-E Demo
- White Knight Chronicles II (JP Digital)
Some people have been asking about the performance impact of AVX-512 on RPCS3, so here's a quick comparison
i9-11900K at 5.1GHz, hyper-threading enabled
AVX-512 disabled vs AVX-512 enabled
On this scenario, we see an uplift of around 20%
2 of the last Loadable games are now Ingame:
- Twisted Land: Shadow Town, fixed by implementing system GUI callbacks;
- Wall-E Demo, fixed with improvements to cellGame data functions.
However, 2 games were found regressed from an old commit, so we're currently at 3 Loadable
An issue with memory region allocation has been fixed, fixing deterministic crashes in several games, including "Dynasty Warriors: Gundam Reborn" and "Musou Orochi Z" - starting on RPCS3 v0.0.29-15508