PlayStation 3 emulator gets shiny new UI for handheld PCs like the Steam Deck

Considering it's emulating one of the most complex consoles ever made, PS3 emulator RPCS3 is remarkably easy to use. On desktop it has a load of helpful tooltips explaining the basic, recommended settings, with lots of graphical settings and checkboxes for the tinkering-inclined to play with if they so choose. The controller-friendly "big picture" experience wasn't quite so polished, but that's now changed with recent updates to the emulator polishing up the in-game overlay.

As you can see in the video above, the UI for running RPCS3 on a handheld like the Steam Deck now looks quite a bit like SteamOS itself. While the emulator did have an overlay already, it wasn't nearly as functional. You'd have to dig through layers of menus to access things like graphical or audio options, and not everything was tweakable while a game was running.

Now pulling up the overlay by pressing Start + Select offers immediate access to some handy options—taking a screenshot, saving state, restarting the game—as well as access to a settings menu with most of the adjustments available without further digging. Key graphics options like resolution scaling and the framerate limiter are right there and easy to adjust.

There are some more advanced settings here too, and without the helpful tooltips of the desktop UI they might not be intuitive to new users. But on the bright side, there's also an easily enabled or disabled performance overlay for monitoring framerate, and most of the settings can be changed without having to reboot a game. (Even rendering resolution, which until this recent work required a restart.)

The upshot is dialing in performance on a Steam Deck or ROG Ally should be relatively painless.

RPCS3 has been a marvel of a project for years now, being able to boot every game from the PlayStation 3 library and even bringing back online matchmaking for some beloved games. But I'd say its developers have been on a hot streak recently, both in terms of quality of life additions and performance improvements. Last month the emulator added an option on desktop to right-click a game and create a Steam shortcut, adding it directly to your Steam library. And just as these handheld-focused updates have rolled out, the team has also given the emulator a nice little speed boost.

Valve's upcoming Steam Machine should be a great PlayStation 3 emulator box, assuming this year's hardware shortages and soaring prices don't make it impossible to release.