RPCS3 has high hopes for Sony PS6 when it comes to PS3 emulation
RPCS3 recently announced a major feature that lets you play physical PlayStation 3 games directly from Blu-ray discs, with an important caveat. Seeing this, a user asked the RPCS3 team whether “Sony was just lazy and could have done PS3 game compatibility officially?” The RPCS3 team thinks that wouldn’t have been possible on the PS4, calling the PS4’s CPU “a complete toaster, on pure numbers-crunching FLOPS benchmark, it even loses to PS3's Cell”.
PS3 emulation using RPCS3 is incredibly CPU-intensive. So much so that the official RPCS3 system requirements list a 6-core Ryzen 5 9600X and a 14-core Intel Core i5-13600K as examples of “Optimal” CPUs. For maximum performance, RPCS3 needs CPUs like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
So, it is not surprising that the Sony PlayStation 4 with its measly 8-core AMD Jaguar CPU was never going to be enough for PS3 emulation. RPCS3 thinks even the PS5, with its 8-core Zen 2 CPU, is not powerful enough to properly emulate PS3 games.
However, the RPCS3 team does have high hopes for the next-generation Sony PS6.
Sony PS6 reportedly features a much more powerful CPU
Per multiple leaks, the Sony PS6 will have a 10-core Zen 6 CPU. This will be a monumental CPU performance leap over the PS5, which uses a CPU architecture from seven years ago.
So, the RPCS3 team thinks that the PS6 “should be the first console that is fully capable of properly emulating the PS3”. This doesn’t mean that Sony will actually offer PS3 emulation on the PS6. It just means that Sony could, if it wanted to, bake PS3 emulation into the PlayStation 6 consoles without having to worry about emulation performance.
We do hope that Sony finds some way to bring PS3, PS4, and PS5 console emulation to the PS6. The chances are slim, as the PS6 is likely to lack a physical disc drive, and Sony also doesn’t seem to have any disc-to-digital program in the works. But we are still at least a year away from the expected PS6 launch window, and a lot can change in a year.
Source(s)
RPCS3 on X, Teaser image source: R on Unsplash, edited
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