The new Alder Lake CPUs released by Intel utterly dominate performance in RPCS3, the PlayStation 3 emulator for PC, as admitted by the software's own makers. This is far from surprising, as we've seen Alder Lake processors successfully retake the gaming performance crown from AMD.
That said, the team behind RPCS3 also recommended disabling the smaller Gracemont high-efficiency CPU E-cores to get the most performance out of your shiny new processor.
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.
11900K vs 12900K, both clocked at 5.2GHz, both with AVX-512 enabled and HT disabled. On God of War: Ascension's starting area, this is a +10 FPS uplift, from ~68 to ~78. Intel 11th Gen already outperforms Zen 3 on RPCS3 by quite a bit, 12th Gen makes the gap even bigger.
When they were asked whether there was any plan to make Alder Lake CPUs work as is, they replied with the following tweet:
We can't force BIOS settings through the emulator. At best, we can add a warning asking users to change it. Alder Lake on base configuration works, it's just slower.
Nowadays, RPCS3 is in a great state. After years of tireless work, about a month ago the team announced there are no PlayStation 3 games or apps that don't boot on the emulator. According to the official compatibility list, the vast majority (63.67%) of titles is playable, while 30.52% of the PS3 software goes in-game but still suffers from performance problems or glitches.
RPCS3, which runs on the Vulkan API (deemed better than DirectX), also supports AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution and even lets you take advantage of the PlayStation Eye Camera functionality in supported games with any camera of your choosing.
👁️📷 RPCS3 now has support for PlayStation Eye Camera functionality!
And of course, you can use any camera you want with it 🙂 pic.twitter.com/m6MjmkJFJY— RPCS3 (@rpcs3) October 24, 2021
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About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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