Undoubtedly RPCS3 is one of the best multi-platform open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulators out there. The emulator can play more than 2000 PS3 titles flawlessly.
Well, if you are an RPCS3 user then there’s some good news for you. Recently, Whatcookie, a software developer behind RPCS3 released a patch that makes use of AVX-512 instructions and brings a 30% performance improvement to the emulator.
In simple words, this means you can expect increased frames per second and better stability on all the RPCS3-supported titles.
In his official blog post, Whatcookie explained that,
When you need to emulate Cell, you need explicit parallelism and large file registers, a combination that AVX-512 CPUs feature. As it turns out, the LVVM compiler automatically chooses the best possible code path, which in the case of AVX-512-enabled hardware means an appropriate code path.
For obvious reasons (we are talking about emulation here at the end of the day) it is not exactly ideal, not all mask registers can be used, for example. AVX-512 also adds new mask registers which can be optionally used with EVEX encoded instructions.
He further added that,
There are new comparison instructions which generate a mask in the mask registers as the result of a comparison between vectors. When a mask register is used as an operand all of the elements not selected by the mask will either be zeroed or leave the existing value in the destination register untouched.
There are 8 mask registers, through k0 – k7, however, only k1 – k7 can be used to mask things out, as k0 implicitly behaves as if all elements are selected.
If you’re using a processor in the leagues of Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9-12900K then this news might not be useful to you. As you’re already achieving 120fps on your favorite titles.
That said, the improvements are welcomed by people with lower-power machines.