We had been told that it was impossible, that it was a platform too complex to be emulated correctly, and that it made no sense with the console still on the market. However, the PlayStation 3 has an emulator that never stopped gaining ground. RPCS3 is a project with half a decade on its shoulders, and although it still has a lot of work ahead, there is no doubt that its growth has been extraordinary.
The State of Backward Compatibility
One of the most delicate points in the last generation of consoles is the lack of backward compatibility. Both Sony and Microsoft continue to explore the path of emulation to run Xbox 360 and PS3 games on their new consoles, but their progress has been slow. The Redmond giant managed to gain a considerable advantage by offering support for dozens of games, including Fallout 3, the Gears of War saga, Halo: Reach, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and the first Borderlands. The story on Sony's side is very different. While the ideal path to run PS2 games is emulation, with PS3 games the strategy points to offering them via streaming using the PlayStation Now service... which is not free. It is supposed that emulating a PS3 is too complicated, due to the complexity of its hardware. But at the same time... we have things like RPCS3.
The Emulator's Evolution
Obviously, RPCS3 is not a project that was born yesterday. According to available information, its development began in May 2011, and its first public version saw the light a year later. What you just saw in the video is the execution of After Burner Climax, thanks to the new backend of DirectX 12 that the latest build of the emulator received. The trained eye will quickly detect several visual errors, but it works much better than we imagined. The specifications of the computer used tell us about an Intel Core i7 6700K processor at 4.6 GHz (an overclocking of 400 MHz above its Turbo mode), 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card with 4 GB of RAM. In short, a high-end computer.
If you think you have what it takes in hardware and you own a couple of PlayStation 3 games, you only have to go to the official RPCS3 site and download a copy. I admit that After Burner Climax is not the most demanding game in the vast PS3 repertoire, however, it would be crazy to deny that framerate. The best is yet to come, and that is especially true in the world of emulation.
