One of the downsides of the PS5 is that it is only backward compatible with the PS4 directly, but it is not compatible with the PS3. This means that many who enjoyed the first HD console had to make the switch to PC to make sure they could play their console games again. This situation worsened a few months ago when SONY announced that it was going to close the PS3 online store and although they backed down, the sword of Damocles on said console had already been put on top and the path to becoming “abandonware” had started.
One solution for many has been the use of PC emulators, which allow us to play old systems on our computer, however the PS3 architecture has a certain level of complexity. Concretely, not of the graphics part where its GPU is a GeForce GTX 7900 from 2006 with 256 MB of VRAM, but of the processor part because of its unique architecture based on the Cell Broadband Engine, where for him the best and the most Advanced of these emulators is the RPCS3 which thanks to the Intel Core 12 has reached new heights of performance.
RPSC3 breaks records on Intel Core 12
If you have an Intel Core 12 and you are using RPSC3 and want to get more performance, you have to do what the creators of the emulator say:
If you are using Alder Lake (Intel Core 12) processor with RPSC3, be sure to turn off small cores, otherwise you will lose a lot of performance, because without the E-Cores you get AVX-512 and a better communication ratio in the ring. ADL performance is by far the best of all CPU architectures.
Compare a i9-11900K and one i9-12900K, both at 5.2 GHz, with the AVX-512 turned on and with the HyperThreading disabled translates the starting area of God of War: Ascension into a 10 FPS increase, 78 FPS vs. 68 FPS compared to Intel Gen 11, which already achieves more performance than Zen3. Generation 12 further increases the difference.
The reason why disabling E-Cores gives much more performance here has a very simple explanation, Intel has long used a ring interconnect as the topology of its CPUs, which is oddly the same as that of the PS3 CBEA, because thus the fact that there are more elements increases the pass-through latency between them. Under the same principle, they ask to deactivate multithreading, because it means having, for practical purposes, 16 cores in the communication infrastructure.
It should be noted that this is linked to the fact that the management of communication between the cores is one of the key elements of PS3 performance, hence it is necessary to reduce the number of active cores in the processor to 8. Which is clear is that the Intel Core 12 is now the best processor for RPSC3.
Intel does not recommend activating the AVX-512 on Generation 12
As we have already mentioned from time to time, the key to emulating the SPE cores of the PS3 processor, the Cell Broadband Engine, is the use of the AVX-512 instructions. Unfortunately, Pat Gelsinger’s company does not recommend activating them under the “supposed” threat of loss of warranty. What do we believe? Since you have to deactivate the E-Cores to activate the AVX-512, this makes it a kind of miniature version of future Xeon Workstations, which would explain Intel’s policy, since it competes with its processors.
Let’s not forget that AVX-512 instructions by nature have a much higher power cost than others, so if you are going to use them make sure you have good cooling with your Intel Core 12. Finally, remember that RPSC3 recently achieved full compatibility. with all console games.
