The ever-industrious Digital Foundry has run a fascinating experiment, testing PS3 emulation running on base PS5 hardware.
It’s achieved this via the recent Linux hack, which has allowed it to install emulator RPCS3 on Sony’s contemporary console.
The results themselves are remarkable, though they perhaps underline why we haven’t seen an official emulator from PlayStation yet.
In simple terms, the testing shows that emulation works well in instances where the PS3’s SPUs weren’t used too heavily.
Because the PS5’s modest CPU is acting as a substitute for the SPUs in the emulator, games that offload many of those tasks struggle to match their native PS3 performance.
One good example of this is GTA: Episodes from Liberty City. In emulation, this game really tests the PS5’s CPU, and so it performs worse than the PS3 in emulation – regardless of whether you pump the resolution up to native 4K.
But for launch era games, which didn’t use the PS3’s SPUs much, the results are excellent. Ridge Racer 7 runs at 60fps in 2160p, while Resistance: Fall of Man achieves 4K at a largely locked 30fps, minus some minor frame pacing issues.
Heck, Ninja Theory’s Heavenly Sword even goes all the way up to 2880p at a fairly steady 30fps.
While the performance does seem more favourable on those launch period games, some later titles also show positive results.
Killzone 3 and MotorStorm Apocalypse, for example, offloaded anti-aliasing to the SPUs, so by disabling MLAA, both games are able to achieve decent results on PS5 via the RPCS3 emulator.
While the results are interesting, Digital Foundry concludes that the PS6 may be the console with enough CPU power to properly cope with PS3 emulation, and these results do appear to reflect that.
We know Implicit Conversions has been working on this, so perhaps there’s a future where PS Plus Premium begins including PS3 Classics as well.
For now, the results here are fascinating, but perhaps not consistent enough to be made available as a commercial product for now.
