Experimental PlayStation 3 Emulator ARMSX3 Released for Android

The creators of the popular PlayStation 2 smartphone emulator have taken on a new project.

The team behind the mobile PlayStation 2 emulator ARMSX2 has introduced ARMSX3, an experimental port of RPCS3 for Android devices. It is currently a proof of concept rather than a finished program for daily use, but the project marks an important step toward full PlayStation 3 emulation on smartphones. ARMSX3 is based on the current RPCS3 code and includes recent improvements for devices with the ARM64 architecture, as reported earlier.

To bring RPCS3 to mobile devices, the developers had to solve several technical problems. Specifically, ARMSX3 was taught to compile shaders correctly on Adreno graphics accelerators. The emulator also recognizes the processor structure featuring performance and power-efficient cores, allowing the heaviest threads to be distributed among the fast cores. LLVM compiler settings are now tailored to the installed chip instead of using parameters from the outdated Cortex-A34 core.

Journalists at Android Authority tested the program on a vivo X300 Ultra. Catherine ran at about 22 frames per second, while 3D Dot Game Heroes ran at 15 frames per second. Skate 3 froze before gameplay began, although the ARMSX3 developers managed to run it on a less powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, where the game achieved 20 to 30 frames per second.

The next stage will involve performance optimization and expanding the list of compatible games. The developers also need to fix crashes, graphical errors, and interface issues. A release date for a more stable version of ARMSX3 has not been announced yet, but the initial results confirm that running PlayStation 3 games on modern Android smartphones is already technically possible.

The first version of ARMSX3 is already available to download for free on GitHub.