Xenia runs on DirectX12 and it has about 60 fps, solid 20-30% CPU usage on average, and 50-ish percent GPU, while Vulkan-based RPCS3 has the same GPU usage, but about 20% higher CPU and 20-25 lower fps. Everything looks much more polished and finished on the PS3 emulator. First off, even though RPCS3 does seem to lag and stutter a bit more, Xenia’s environment looks heavily glitchy/unfinished, being mostly either solid black and white with seemingly random details and spaces colored properly in between or some black dots all over the floors and walls. This is another game that’s never made it to PCs, and it shows considerably different results than Dante’s Inferno. Moving on into the live-action fights, the PS3 emulator still has the same audio issues, and although it keeps displaying steady 60 fps, it does freeze and crash ever so often, while Xenia still takes up the same parameters and even though it stutters a bit, it still runs much more smoothly without crashing. Xenia, on the other hand, seems to be faring far better than that, with the same amount of fps, the CPU usage being about 10% lower and the same GPU, which is remarkable, considering how GPU-heavy the Xbox emulator is. During cinematics, RPCS3 displays solid 60 fps, with the CPU usage of 96% and GPU usage of a mere 25-30%. One thing that’s noticeable right off the bat is that the sound on the RPCS3 version is cutting out every second or so, which is pretty frustrating to witness, while on Xenia it flows smoothly without as much as a stutter. Kicking off with a game that’s a console exclusive, Dante’s Inferno was released in 2010 for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Keep in mind they’re emulating different consoles, and there will probably be no clear winner, as the performance and the degree to which the game is polished differs from game to game. Since it’s rather hard to abstractly compare these two, aside from some basic characteristics, such as which OS they run on (RPCS3 runs on Windows, Linux, and BSD systems, while Xenia only runs on Windows, so far), we’ll do so by comparing their performance on specific games. This, naturally, comes with the fact that the PC configuration will have to be on the stronger side to run the emulators plus games decently. RPCS3 and Xenia both fall under the second category, as they’re the emulators for PlayStation 3 and Xbox, respectively.

There are two reasons someone would want to play an emulated game: one is playing old, vintage (and otherwise unplayable arcade!) games that would otherwise not be playable, or would require spending quite a hefty sum of money to buy the legacy console and the games, which both tend to be overpriced at times, especially if they’re rare editions the other one is playing new-generation games that are console exclusives.

Xenia emulator crash