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You can now replay PS3 classics with AMD Super Resolution

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) isn’t exclusive to individual games, it seems. RPCS3 — the go-to emulator for PlayStation 3 on PC — added support for the feature over the weekend, and it’s the first emulator to do so. Hopefully, it’ll kick off a stream of support from other emulators, too.

The latest RPCS3 build supports FSR, so all you need to do is install the latest version or update the version you have, and you’ll be able to use FSR with your favorite PS3 games. To enable the feature, follow Configuration > GPU in the app, tick the Enable FSR Upscaling box, and set the strength of the sharpening filter.

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RPCS3 is now the first game console emulator to support FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

Update to the latest RPCS3 build and try it out!

— RPCS3 (@rpcs3) August 6, 2021

RPCS3 is an open-source emulator that’s in active development. The team describes new builds as “highly experimental” as the developers continue to support emerging tools like FSR. As is the case with a lot of emulators, you need a PS3 BIOS file to use RPCS3, as well as game files dumped from the original disk.

Performance may not be what you’re expecting from a console that’s 15 years old, either. The PS3’s Cell processor was notoriously difficult to develop for, so running PS3 games on PC, especially through an emulator, is no easy task. RPCS3’s database says about 62% of games are “playable,” though many of the best PS3 games, including The Last of Us and Metal Gear Solid 4, have an “in-game” rating instead.

With FSR now available, players can push their output resolution much higher than they’d normally be able to without pushing the game beyond its limits. However, it may not work well in all games. With the CPU at the heart of the PS3, many of its titles don’t stress the graphics card as much as a normal game would. FSR can’t always help in those cases.

Similarly, older games use older anti-aliasing methods, if they use them at all. Scaling up an image will scale up jagged edges, too, which may not be the result you’re looking for. In proper implementations, FSR comes after anti-aliasing, leading to a much smoother end result, as we found in our FidelityFX Super Resolution review.

PS3 consoles at a trade show.
Wikipedia / Wikipedia

RPCS3 is the first emulator to add FSR support, but the feature has steamrolled its way into several GitHub repositories and modding projects since it launched. Even before launch, a modder was able to patch FSR into Grand Theft Auto Vand since launch, tools have emerged to allow you to add FSR to basically any game.

Magpie, for example, allows you to apply upscaling to almost any PC game, and Valve has added it to its Proton compatibility layer for Linux ahead of the Steam Deck’s launch.

FSR is largely based on the Lanczos resampling algorithm, which has been around for several decades. AMD’s implementation simply takes more care to add it at the proper stage during rendering and cleans up the image with a sharpening pass. Although more games, game engines, and emulators will likely support it in the future, they may not all produce the same results.

Jacob Roach
Former Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
All the games that support AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution
A woman wielding a weapon jumps out of red smoke.

AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is here, promising up to a 2.5 times performance increase in supported games across Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Not only are old and new games alike getting FSR support, but AMD is also improving FSR itself, which is now in version 2.0. Although FSR 2.0 doesn't always look quite as good as Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), it has better support for GPUs from both graphics companies and for most will provide about the same image quality as Nvidia's upscaler.

At the moment, the vast majority of games that support FSR use version 1.0, but that's only because version 2.0 is much newer. Over the coming months, many games will be adding FSR 2.0 to its graphics options.
AMD FSR 2.0 games available now
Deathloop

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Why playing PS3 games on a PS5 is way harder than it sounds
A stack of PS3 games.

PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
We're over 15 years removed from the PS3's launch, and there's still no good way to play many classic PS3 titles like Infamous or Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern platforms. Sony is content to continue PlayStation Now's approach to PS3 gaming with PlayStation Plus Premium. This stands out when Xbox and Nintendo are doing a relatively good job at natively emulating or remastering games from older systems for modern platforms.
To learn why PS3 games are so hard to bring to modern consoles, I spoke to Whatcookie, a contributor for the popular PS3 emulator RPCS3. Whatcookie, who chose not to share his name, is also known for creating a 60 frames per second patch for the PS3 version of Demon's Souls. He broke down what makes PS3 emulation particularly frustrating and sheds some light on why Sony is content with streaming PS3 games from the cloud instead.
CELL it
The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn't much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony's latest system, with a couple of exceptions. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail. 

"The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance," Whatcookie explains. "The CELL even surpasses the PS4's CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance."
The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360. This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called "unfriendly to emulation," where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU.
"This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU's memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen," Whatcookie says. "This type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
These extra steps on a function that developers would usually contain to the GPU make emulation difficult. Still, a large dedicated team at RPCS3 has put in a lot of work to create a functional emulator for modern PCs. According to Whatcookie, it's totally possible to get PS3 emulation working on a PS5.
"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…

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FSR 2.0 is the complete reboot AMD’s upscaling needed
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AMD announced the next version of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) not too long ago and the company shed more light on how it works on a technical level at GDC 2022.

FSR 1.0 wasn't perfect, and the new version looks to improve image quality while sticking to the values that made FSR stand out in the first place. Here's what we learned about FSR 2.0 at GDC 2022, and how it might impact your PC games in the future.
FSR 2.0 quality modes and support

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