In December 2024, the RPCS3 team officially announced arm64 architecture support, letting the PlayStation 3 emulator run natively on Linux, macOS and Windows arm64 devices. Until then, ARM users had to rely on x86 translation layers, paying a heavy performance tax on top of an already demanding emulator. Native execution removes that middleman entirely.
The port was harder than a recompile. RPCS3 was written with x86 in mind, and some architectural decisions hinged on x86-specific behaviour — notably the way JIT blocks unwind the stack through a ret chain. ARM64 uses a dedicated link register instead, so the first return would send the CPU into an infinite loop jumping to its own position.
Rather than maintain two backends, the team took a smarter route. Developer kd-11 settled on an IR transformer: generate the LLVM IR once for a reference architecture (amd64), then transform it to target others as required. A customised LLVM fork had homebrew running by March 2024, and commercial titles booted on arm64 with PPU LLVM by late June.
The showcases made the point better than any benchmark. The team published a comparison of native Apple Silicon against Rosetta 2 translation, plus a Raspberry Pi 5 demo. Watching a Pi 5 push PS3 emulation — at settings that make it look more like a PSP — is exactly the kind of thing that redefines what entry-level ARM hardware is supposed to be capable of.
Source: Introducing RPCS3 for arm64 — RPCS3 Blog, 9 December 2024