The titanic efforts of RPCS3 emulator developers have finally paid off, and recently one of the best PlayStation 3 exclusives has come close to the coveted “playable” status. If your system unit is equipped with a fairly fast, up-to-date 6-8 core processor, then you should be able to play God of War: Ascension from start to finish.

First and foremost, make sure that the edition of your copy of God of War: Ascension is up to version 01.12. With older editions, all of the settings below may not work properly.

The second and equally important thing is to check the version of your emulator: it should be at least RPCS3 v0.0.27 Alpha | master (main branch). Update it if it is necessary. If your version is significantly newer, it is likely that you will no longer need some of the settings. Try playing the game without any additional changes. It may also happen that with the settings below, the game will refuse to start at all. In this case, please let us know in the comments section of this post and we will try to create a new guide as soon as possible.

Well, and thirdly: currently there are some problems in the work of the God of War: Ascension project on the RPCS3 emulator: from rare visual artifacts during shader compilation to equally rare program crashes and critical bugs. However, this does not prevent you from completing the game from start to finish.

Besides, don’t forget that this title hasn’t received the Playable status yet. Therefore, no one can give 100% guarantees that you will be able to complete the game without encountering any critical bugs.

You can download the latest version of the emulator on the official website of the developers.

RPSC3 configuration for God of War: Ascension

Start the emulator and find “Manage” in the top drop-down menu, then “Game Patches”:

In this window, you need to find your version of the disc with the game “God of War: Ascension” and check the following items inside:

  • “Disable Depth of Field”
  • “Disable MLAA”
  • “Disable Motion Blur”

Click “Apply”, “Save” and close the window. Next, right-click on the “God of War: Ascension” icon, then select “Change Custom Configuration”:

In this window, set the settings according to the selected options and screenshots below.

CPU configuration

SettingOptionDescription
SPU block sizeMegaImproves performance without sacrificing stability.

GPU configuration

SettingsOptionDescription
ZCULL accuracyApproximateImproves performance compared to “precise”. Do not try to use “relaxed”, this option breaks the graphics and degrades performance.
Write color buffersOnFixes lighting problems in cut scenes. BUT! If you have activated the patches, DO NOT ENABLE THIS OPTION! The game may not start in some cases.

Advanced configuration

SettingsOptionDescription
Sleep timers accuracyAs HostSlight improvement in performance.
RSX FIFO accuracyAtomicPromotes stability. However, you can play around with it if you have problems with stability. The “Fast” option can also be used.

Thus, we were able to achieve a relatively stable, and most importantly, acceptable FPS of about 30-60 on the Intel Core i5-12400F processor. Of course, on chips weaker than this, the frame rate drop will be more significant, but the game didn’t run any better on the original PS3 console.

After spending more than 12 hours on God of War: Ascension for more than 12 hours, we found out that the emulation is definitely not perfect, which is why the game can crash randomly. However, when restarting the game, gamers can continue their progress without any problems.

At the same time, processors with the outdated Intel Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge architecture experience much more significant problems: long loading of geometry with textures, and as a result, no collision for interaction with the character. This, in turn, leads to Kratos falling through the game surfaces and rolling back to the last checkpoint.

To a certain extent, this problem can be solved by pausing the game at the moment of visually noticeable underloading (lack of) geometry and then unpausing it after it has loaded. However, I can’t call such gameplay enjoyable.

Also, on old and weak processors, scripts may not work correctly, which is why some bosses and monsters simply do not appear and your game save files break. Even after restarting the game, it will be impossible to continue the story.

According to our measurements, more or less adequately God of War: Ascension is emulated starting with 6-core AMD Zen 2 / Intel Cofee Lake chips and AMD Radeon RX 400 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 graphics cards. Otherwise, it will be difficult to avoid significant problems.

Test the above settings and describe the results in the comments, as well as ask questions that interest you.

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One reply on “Setting up the RPCS3 v0.0.27+ emulator for God of War: Ascension”

  • Inga Botts
    28.12.2023 at 22:54

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