NEWS · EMULATORS
PUBLISHEDNovember 22, 2020
READING1 min
RPCS3: PS3 emulator developers significantly improve shader compilation and initial boot times
The RPCS3 team has significantly sped up shader compilation and initial game load times by parallelizing processes across multiple CPU threads.
The PlayStation 3 emulator development team has significantly improved shader compilation, speeding up initial game launches.
Don't get too excited just yet: this improvement won't boost raw game performance. Instead, the new optimizations in the RPCS3 emulator code target initial shader compilation, speeding up the very first launch of a game.
Still, this is a massive and much-needed milestone. Major emulator updates often force games to recompile shaders on launch, which can be an annoying, slow process for larger titles. Fortunately, by parallelizing compilation across multiple CPU threads, this process now takes just seconds.
You can see the difference for yourself in the official video from the RPCS3 team:
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Many of the recorded clips used 4 threads. While higher values are faster, the difference between 4 and 8 shader compilation threads is relatively minor. Because of this, we expect all users whose PCs meet RPCS3's recommended requirements to see a massive improvement in shader compilation!
In other words, virtually anyone with a quad-core CPU or better will get a massive boost in compilation speed.
