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God of War 3 PC vs RPCS3: Native PC port runs much faster than PS3 emulator

You can use the Sony DualShock 4 controller to play games on a PC.
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You can use the Sony DualShock 4 controller to play games on a PC.
God of War 3 can now be played on PCs thanks to a fan-made PC port. However, you could already play the game on your gaming systems with the RPCS3 PS3 emulator. As it turns out, the two methods aren't equal in terms of performance.

RPCS3, the world’s best Sony PlayStation 3 emulator, recently reached a historic milestone. The PS3 emulator can now play over 80% of the PS3 library. RPCS3’s “Playable” list, however, does not include God of War 3, one of the best-looking PS3 games. The game is still in the “Ingame” list due to it being incredibly demanding to run on RPCS3. This is something that a native PC port could’ve easily fixed. 

While, sadly, we don’t have an official God of War 3 PC port from Sony, we do have a fan-made one that recently went online. This PC port was made possible through native recompilation, where the developer recompiled God of War 3's PS3 code for PC.

As it turns out, God of War 3’s native, fan-made PC port performs much faster than emulating the game using RPCS3. A side-by-side comparison shows the native PC port can hit up to 150 FPS in a scene where RPCS3 manages around 57 FPS. The PC used for comparison featured an AMD Ryzen 5 5600GT and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 (get one on Amazon).

The performance comparison perfectly exemplifies the enormous difficulty of emulating the PS3 in general and a demanding game like God of War 3 in particular. This is exactly why RPCS3 needs a beefy CPU for fast performance. The Ryzen 5 5600GT used for comparison only meets RPCS3’s “Recommended” CPU spec to get PS3-like performance. Processors like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D or the Core i9-14900K are needed to get the maximum performance out of RPCS3.

Finally, Sony is currently remaking the original God of War trilogy. While the company has moved away from releasing its exclusive games on PCs, we hope Sony changes course in the near future, and gamers won’t have to rely on unofficial PC ports and emulation.

Source(s)

Samir on X, Teaser image sourc: Teddy GR

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> Expert reviews and news on laptops, smartphones and tech innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2026 10 > God of War 3 PC vs RPCS3: Native PC port runs much faster than PS3 emulator
Fawad Murtaza, 2026-10-26 (Update: 2026-10-26)