The team behind the mobile PlayStation 2 emulator ARMSX2 has introduced ARMSX3 — an experimental port of RPCS3 for Android devices. For now, it's a "proof of concept" rather than a ready-to-use program for everyday use, but the project marks an important step towards full PlayStation 3 emulation on smartphones. ARMSX3 is based on the current RPCS3 code and includes recent improvements for ARM64 devices, which were reported earlier.
To port RPCS3 to mobile devices, the developers had to solve several technical problems. In particular, ARMSX3 was taught to correctly compile shaders on Adreno graphics accelerators. The emulator also recognizes the structure of processors with performance and energy-efficient cores, thanks to which the most demanding threads are distributed among the fast cores. LLVM compiler settings are now selected for the installed chip instead of using parameters from the outdated Cortex-A34 core.
Android Authority journalists tested the program on the vivo X300 Ultra. Catherine ran at approximately 22 frames per second, and 3D Dot Game Heroes at 15 frames. Skate 3 froze before gameplay began, although ARMSX3 developers managed to run it on a less powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, where the game showed 20-30 FPS.
The next step will be to optimize performance and expand the list of compatible games. Developers also need to eliminate crashes, graphical errors, and interface problems. The release dates for a more stable version of ARMSX3 have not yet been announced, but the first results confirm that running PlayStation 3 games on modern Android smartphones is already technically possible.
The first version of ARMSX3 can already be downloaded for free from GitHub.