ARMSX3 1.5 moves Android PS3 emulation onto RPCS3's rebuilt RSX graphics core and adds an OpenGL renderer

The Android PS3 emulator ARMSX3 just had its biggest week since launch. Version 1.5 landed on October 29 and swaps the emulator's graphics core for the brand-new RSX rewrite that RPCS3 developer kd-11 merged into RPCS3 the same week. Two follow-ups, 1.5.1 (October 30) and 1.5.2 (October 31), have already cleaned up what the switch broke. It's only a few days since ARMSX3 1.4.

Why the RSX rewrite matters

The RSX is the PS3's graphics chip, so every frame a game draws goes through its emulation. According to the release notes, kd-11 spent about two years rebuilding it: 88 changes and over 13,000 lines of code. The old code lived mostly in one huge file; the new design splits it into the parts the real hardware has (a command reader, the display and timing side, and the renderer), keeps what the game thinks the chip is doing apart from what your phone's GPU is actually doing, and models the chip's command processor more closely. The practical upshot for Android players is that ARMSX3 is back on the same graphics design as desktop RPCS3, so future RPCS3 graphics fixes can come across much more easily. ARMSX3's own extras carried over too: frame generation, remote play, custom Turnip drivers, Multithreaded RSX, frame pacing and the earlier Adreno and Mali fixes.

The other headline changes

• A real OpenGL renderer. Before 1.5 the OpenGL option did nothing. Now it runs on your device's own driver or on ANGLE, which draws through Vulkan and can dodge bugs in some Mali and other non-Adreno drivers. The developers are clear it's slower than Vulkan and meant as a fallback; Vulkan with a custom driver is still the recommended setup.
• Bundled game fixes are on for everyone, without downloading the patch database first. The notes name Ratchet & Clank freeze fixes, Burnout Paradise, J-Stars, Splatterhouse and Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure.
• WET now boots and plays.
• Logs now record how your last session ended: closed, crashed, or killed by Android to free memory.

1.5.1 and 1.5.2

1.5.1 got God of War Collection, Everybody's Golf: World Tour and other Multithreaded RSX games starting and closing again after the rewrite broke them, gets Everybody Dance in-game, and makes Apply & Restart actually keep in-game menu changes, so you can switch between Vulkan and OpenGL mid-session. 1.5.2 gets the PS3's XMB menu starting again, keeps it from crashing on Vulkan when you switch apps or turn the screen off, smooths animated game icons with FFmpeg 8.1.1, and moves OpenGL texture uploads on Adreno's stock driver to a persistent buffer, which takes a lot of load off the render thread. The developer also notes ARMSX3 has passed 50,000 downloads on the Play Store.

Before you update

The new core stores the graphics chip's state differently, so savestates from 1.4.x won't load in 1.5. Make a normal in-game save first. If you pick an old state, you'll get a message instead of a hang. ARMSX3 is free on GitHub, with APKs for Android 11, 13 and 15 builds plus a legacy ARMv8.1 build. You need your own PS3 games and the official PS3 system software from Sony; Overclocked doesn't host or link firmware or game files. Compare it with the other Android options on our emulators hub.

Sources: ARMSX3 1.5 release notes on GitHub, ARMSX3 1.5.1 release notes, ARMSX3 1.5.2 release notes, Joking Joystick. Facts verified against the original reports; written by Overclocked.