PlayStation 3 Emulator Making Progress On Linux Support

[devius]

Physical PS3 games have DRM on them that require cracking as well, as has every console that used optical media AFAIK.

Mega-CD didn't use any kind of copy protection, so you can play copied CDs perfectly fine. I think that was also the case with the PCEngine/TurboGrafx16 CD.

[hansg]

A working PS3 emulator with a halfway decent frame rate: congrats, that's some amazing work guys! I'll be keeping an eye on this one, maybe one day I can use it to play some of the Metal Gear games that were never ported to PC... Or maybe Konami will allow someone to do a port one day. Or maybe pigs will fly, after all, who can tell the future ;-)

[cb88]

While the difference in GPUs between PS3 and PS4 is like 10x, the CPU only improved by about 2x. The reason being a combination of the tour de force that was the PS3's CPU and the relative slowing of process-driven performance improvements.

The PS3's failing was all the effort software had to do to unleash the raw horsepower of the hardware. Sony took a good ass kicking for that, but the progress made by developers towards the end of PS3's reign was simply stunning.

The 2x CPU figure is a bit off... the Cell really only has 1 CPU + 6 math coprocessors, each PS4 Jaguar core is complete and out of order unlike the PS3 SPEs which are in order and never get anywhere near thier peak performance due to that... while the Jaguar also may not get near peak, it can get much closer due to not having to stall the CPU as much it can continue executing while waiting for data to load for something else. Essentially, the PS3 was doing a lot of stuff on the SPEs that can be done on the GPU now much much more efficiently as well.... so the need for all the FLOPs that the SPEs provided isn't there anymore. The actual speedup going from PS3 to PS4 is probably more like 10-50x and the software is much easier to write using more standard APIs, and this comes down to a combination of much of the software moving out of the CPU and onto the much much faster GPU.

Bear in mind that the Cell SPEs in order to run fast must stay within thier scratchpad ram period.... whereas PS4 has 2Mb cache to main memory for each of it's two 4 core modules (an optimization here would be to schedule related tasks on the same 4 core module, and ensure that tasks that are memory heavy but do not share data are not on the same module) in short the PS4 setup is more flexible. So, the raw numbers are high for the cell... due to the restrictions it's memory setup imposes you can't run software that is as complex as what the PS4 can... leaving all that raw power potentially untapped.

[toguro123]

The PS3 CPU had a floating point performance (single) of around 180GFLOPS. I can only imagine what monster machine will be required to emulate this system and get half-decent framerates.

[toguro123]

The 2x CPU figure is a bit off... the Cell really only has 1 CPU + 6 math coprocessors, each PS4 Jaguar core is complete and out of order unlike the PS3 SPEs which are in order and never get anywhere near thier peak performance due to that... while the Jaguar also may not get near peak, it can get much closer due to not having to stall the CPU as much it can continue executing while waiting for data to load for something else. Essentially, the PS3 was doing a lot of stuff on the SPEs that can be done on the GPU now much much more efficiently as well.... so the need for all the FLOPs that the SPEs provided isn't there anymore. The actual speedup going from PS3 to PS4 is probably more like 10-50x and the software is much easier to write using more standard APIs, and this comes down to a combination of much of the software moving out of the CPU and onto the much much faster GPU.

Bear in mind that the Cell SPEs in order to run fast must stay within thier scratchpad ram period.... whereas PS4 has 2Mb cache to main memory for each of it's two 4 core modules (an optimization here would be to schedule related tasks on the same 4 core module, and ensure that tasks that are memory heavy but do not share data are not on the same module) in short the PS4 setup is more flexible. So, the raw numbers are high for the cell... due to the restrictions it's memory setup imposes you can't run software that is as complex as what the PS4 can... leaving all that raw power potentially untapped.

As far as I remember back when I use to write code for my PS3's SPEs I used to get close to 98% efficiency (in GFLOPs) when doing numerical tasks (matrix products and the like).

[mulenmar]

Who are you with? Both paypal and my actual bank provided mastercard both go through to GOG without a hitch.

I've tried via Paypal or directly via either Visa- or Mastercard-network cards. I'd prefer to not answer that any more precisely, for privacy reasons. Good for you on it working -- for me, it's hit-and-miss. Visa and Mastercard giftcards don't work at all either., but that's to be expected.

Yeah, I bought from them a couple years ago without any drama.

I also suspect some gamers might be partially to blame. Perhaps parents seeing these charges on their credit cards and the lying kids swearing ignorance resulted in many legitimate charges being contested. This could contribute them being blacklisted.

Maybe, maybe not; all I can figure out is that they've got a piranha up their ass about the bank being in Cypress due to lots of fraud and "terrorist" transactions going through there.

[kpedersen]

Huh? Steam lets you download the games in your library, and run them without an internet connection (unless it's an online game, of course). It's no less future-proof than optical media was.

Huh? Do people really think that their hardware they have activated Steam's DRM with will still be working in 5 years? You *will* need to reactivate your games every time you replace your broken hardware (especially hard drives with a unique ID).

Have a big think on how DRM works and how it will affect you in the future. CD-ROM Images as ISO files are a *lot* more future proof than digital DRM schemes.

(Also I used to be a bit of a Steam DRM cracker back in the day. You are required to reactivate everything every 6 months. It is built into the steam.dll code.)

[ldo17]

I don't understand why people are afraid of steam closing.

Yeah, DRM is fine. Trust our DRM.

[TheBlackCat]

As far as I remember back when I use to write code for my PS3's SPEs I used to get close to 98% efficiency (in GFLOPs) when doing numerical tasks (matrix products and the like).

Gaming isn't numerical work. Of course if you are doing numerical work designed to run on the numerical processors you are going to use the numerical processors. But if you are doing primarily CPU work that has to farm out a small subset of tasks to coprocessors you are going to take a major performance hit.

[coder]

The 2x CPU figure is a bit off...

No, I was talking about raw compute power - and not just FLOPS, either. The other comments in my post were an acknowledgment of the difficulty of tapping its full potential.

each PS4 Jaguar core is complete and out of order unlike the PS3 SPEs which are in order and never get anywhere near thier peak performance due to that...

First, the Jag is running at about half the clock speed, so that slightly offsets its OoO. Second, the SPEs must work in scratch pad. If trying to go straight to RAM (IDK if that's even possible without a DMA), shoot the idiot programmer. The burden falls entirely on software to do any prefetching and write buffering. These are both things that a modern CPU does behind your back.

I think the primary means by which developers were eventually able to unleash the PS3's performance was through optimized libraries.

the software is much easier to write using more standard APIs,

Yes, I get this.

Programming the Cell's SPEs effectively shouldn't really be harder than GPU compute. The only difference is that the PS3 didn't have OpenCL.