Just recently, RPCS3 emulator developers announced that their brainchild is now fully compatible with the legendary Gran Turismo game series. Even before the summer of 2023, the fifth part of the Japanese racing franchise had serious performance issues, but in June it received a significant breakthrough in emulation on RPCS3.
Of course, at the moment the game is very demanding to your PC hardware (we’ll talk more about it below), but unlike last year, crashes and most of the graphical bugs have disappeared.
Requirements for Gran Turismo 5 emulation
First, check the version of your emulator: it must be at least RPCS3 v0.0.29 Alpha | master (main branch). Update it if necessary. If your version is significantly newer, it is likely that you will no longer need some settings. Try to play the game without additional changes. It may happen that with the settings below, the game will refuse to run at all. In that case, let us know in the comments of this post and we will try to compile a new guide as soon as possible.
At the moment in the emulation of Gran Turismo 5 on RPCS3 there are some problems: from the almost constant shader compilation (the first time on each map), to less rare program crashes, extremely high CPU requirements and as a consequence, FPS drops in graphically loaded scenes.
Also, don’t forget that this title has not yet received the status of “Playable”. Therefore, no one gives 100% guarantees that you will be able to pass the game to the end without catching some critical bug.
RPSC3 configuration for Gran Turismo 5
Start the emulator and right click on the “Gran Turismo 5” icon, then left click on “Change/Create Custom Configuration” in the drop down menu:
In this window (in each of the demonstrated tabs) set the settings according to the selected options and screenshots below.
CPU configuration (CPU tab)
| Setting | Option | Description |
|---|---|---|
| SPU block size | Mega | Increases performance without harming stability. |
Here you can also play with the SPU Decoder parameter (if you are not satisfied with the performance, or the game sometimes crashes), changing it to Recompiler (ASMJIT).
Graphics card configuration (GPU tab)
| Setting | Option | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution scale | 100 | If you set it to more than 100%, it may cause the game to crash. |
Right now, increasing the resolution above 100% causes a significant drop in performance, as well as game crashes on most PC builds. However, if you have high performance components (Zen 4 / Alder Lake + RTX 3000 / RX 6000) you can try to increase this parameter.
Advanced settings (Advanced tab)
| Setting | Option | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Accurate RSX reservation access | On | If your processor doesn’t support the TSX extension (it probably doesn’t), be sure to enable this option! |
| RSX FIFO accuracy | Atomic | Slightly reduces performance but significantly improves game stability. |
Hidden settings (Debug tab)
By default, this tab is hidden in the emulator settings, but this is easy to fix: open Explorer and go to the RPCS3 folder, then to GuiConfigs and open the CurrentSettings.ini file, then find and change the line showDebugTab=false to showDebugTab=true. Save the change, restart the emulator and open the game settings again. Now the Debug tab is available for editing.
| Setting | Option | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Disable ZCull occlusion queries | On | Slightly improves the overall performance of the game. |
Now let’s move on to the results obtained.
RPSC3 setting results for Gran Turismo 5
For the umpteenth time I regret to inform you that owners of old processors (like Ryzen 1000-2000 or Xeon E5-2600 v3/v4) will not be able to play Gran Turismo 5 comfortably.
On a PC with Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3090 with all the above settings it comes out something around 17-60 FPS in especially heavy-loaded tracks (night roads, cities and so on) and up to 40-70 FPS on simple tracks.
But Ryzen 5 3600 is not the most powerful CPU. When emulating Gran Turismo 5 on the Core i5-12400F, it turned out that this CPU produces something around 24-70 FPS in graphically loaded tracks and more than 50-80 on simple maps, which is much more comfortable, which means that it can be considered a starting point in emulating Gran Turismo 5.
Below are screenshots taken on AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor and RTX 3090 video card:
Clearly, Gran Turismo 5 emulation is not perfect: in some places there are problems with visual effects and a significant FPS drop on relatively weak processors. Nevertheless, during several hours the game never crashed and worked extremely stable.
Now a couple of words about required hardware on the current version of RPCS3 v0.0.29+ emulator. According to our measurements, Gran Turismo 5 is more or less adequately emulated starting from 6-core chips of AMD Zen 3 / Intel Rocket Lake generation (this is really necessary hardware) and AMD Radeon RX 400 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 graphics cards, and for comfortable gameplay with stable 60 FPS “everywhere and everywhere” you will need a high-frequency 6-core (better 8-core) Alder Lake chip (Core 12-13-14 generation) or Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000). Otherwise, significant performance issues will be extremely difficult to avoid.
Test the above settings and describe your results in the comments, as well as ask your questions.
