The RPCS3 project has made huge strides on the x64 platform over the years, bringing PlayStation 3 emulation to PC gamers, even as Sony has only managed to deliver PS3 games through cloud streaming. Now, RPCS3 has hit another milestone by announcing official support for the arm64 architecture, which allows RPCS3 to natively run on Linux, macOS and Windows on devices powered by arm64-based processors.

The road to this point has been a challenging one, with the development team initially starting the effort back in 2021, shortly after the launch of Apple Silicon. It wasn't until 2022 that the team managed to get anything running in the emulator, although with very poor performance. Finally, in early 2024, one of the developers hit a breakthrough with an LLVM compiler that allowed titles to run in a playable state. More improvements followed, to the point the team was comfortable making the announcement.

By far and away the most impressive part of this work is that PS3 emulation is possible on a Raspberry Pi 5. Now, it comes with a caveat that the resolution is limited to 272p, which matches that of the PlayStation Portable, but I's still incredible. Meanwhile, Apple Silicon continues to show that its adept at game emulation, as several games running at 60fps or higher on macOS with slower performance under Asahi Linux. Unfortunately, development for Windows arm64 devices is still in very early stages and isn't particularly usable just yet.

It's exciting to see the RPCS3 team make such incredible strides in bringing PS3 emulation to arm64. While running games on native hardware will always deliver an ideal experience, the convenience of game emulation will always be welcome by enthusiasts and potentially make older games more accessible to a wider audience.