First time ever: RPCS3 emulator plays one of most CPU-heavy PS3 games at 60+ FPS

RPCS3 continues its relentless march to play the entire PS3 game library with good performance and no glitches, courtesy of frequent bug fixes that increase performance and updates that resolve graphical issues. The RPCS3 team has now announced on X that the PS3 emulator has hit 70 FPS for the first time ever in Twisted Metal.

Twisted Metal launched all the way back in 2012 and targeted 30 FPS at a 720p resolution. The game pushed PlayStation 3’s Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) to their limit, which means that it is super hard to emulate with good performance on RPCS3. So, it is a pretty big deal that RPCS3 has managed to hit 70 FPS in Twisted Metal, although the result required RPCS3’s “Max Performance Tier”.

Responding to a user query regarding the potential performance of Twisted Metal on a PC with a Ryzen 5 5600 CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and an RX 5700 GPU, the RPCS3 team explains that such a configuration will yield “well below” 30 FPS. The reason for such a huge performance penalty for an older 6-core CPU is that Twisted Metal is “one of the most CPU-intensive games to emulate, as it makes very intensive use of the SPUs”, per the RPCS3 team.

So, if you want to play Twisted Metal at or above 60 FPS on RPCS3, you’ll need to have a beefy CPU in your gaming PC. RPCS3’s 70 FPS required Linux and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D (Available on Amazon).

Finally, the RPCS3 team still hasn’t categorized Twisted Metal as “Playable”. RPCS3 needs to be able to play a game from start to finish with “playable performance and no game-breaking glitches” for a game to be put into the “Playable” list. This means that the team is still hard at work optimizing Twisted Metal to get its performance up to the mark.