this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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It surprises me a bit that PS3 emulation isn't a thing on some of the newest Android phones (but not actually good yet). I could probably do PS2 fairly well on my current phone, and it's so old it's an LG, was the jump from PS2 to PS3 that big of a jump? (Having lived through that era... actually yeah, it kinda was.)
The PS3 has a really weird CPU/GPU design that makes it challenging to emulate with any reasonable performance. The same was true for the PS2, which is why a console that old still has to rely on hacks and workarounds to gain any decent performance even on desktop, but the PS3 is a good bit faster and a decent chunk weirder. It also has better copy protection, though I'm sure that has been cracked by now.
I believe it's more a "the PS3 CPU architecture was an absolute nightmare and emulating it is difficult/slow" more than it had anything to do with the graphics rendering portion- which is typically where phones would have made the most substantial advancements. There are specific instruction sets that need to be supported by any CPU emulating PS3 to run anywhere near native speed... And I don't believe much work has been done for ARM cpu's to support the needed instructions in mobile devices.
I believe RCPS3 uses a translation layer in order to achieve its accuracy, so I think porting it would be relatively easy. Then again, the last words of any programer are that something should be relatively easy.
Higher end mobile processors could but it is a big jump in computational load, not just because of the increased processing power of the PS3, but also because it is quite architecturally different from traditional x86 CPUs.
This is why it's kind of amazing how efficient RPCS3 is.