A Guide to Choosing the Best Free PS3 Emulator for PC

When it came to the best game consoles, the Sony PS3 or PlayStation 3 used to be right there at the top at one time. It can deliver realistic graphics at 30 fps and gives a tough competition to both Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox. Price has had been a big concern for gamers. At around $200 and that too for a 12GB model, it comes at a premium. And playing new games means spending an additional $12-$50.

Guide to Choosing the Best Free PS3 Emulator for PC
PS3 Emulator

  However, if you have a powerful PC you are good to play your favorite PS3 games on it. All you will need to do is to download the Best PS3 Emulator for PC. Once you have the emulator, you can play any PS3 games for free.

What does a PS3 Emulator Do?

  A PS3 emulator for PC can be simply defined as a program that can be installed on your PC and allows you to play console games without having to use the PS3. You will come across many PlayStation emulators, but not all of them work. We used the different ones to determine which one works the best. Here is a list of the free PS3 Emulators for PC that we tested.

CILs Emulator

  Cils Emulator is the first one we put to the test. The application has been developed by Indian developers. We were looking for the fastest emulator that could both install and start the game within 3 minutes. Even though this PS3 Emulator had great specs on paper, we found that it could be installed only on an old PC. We were able to install it only because we had an old laptop. Once installed, we found that the Cils emulator didn’t open, requiring us to have the current .Net Framework.   When the PS3 Emulator eventually worked, it did so only for certain games. Even when the games worked, the experience was not satisfactory. PSeMu3 Emulator   The PSeMu3 is the next PS3 Emulator for PC that we tested. It can be considered as a three-in-one emulator that allows you to play PS1, PS2 and PS3 games using your PC. It can readily copy the PlayStation 3 experience on your PC. It can run 720p at 30fps. The emulator is lighter compared to most of the other emulators, as it takes not more than 50MB space on your system’s drive. It doesn’t require heavy configuration. The minimum resource requirements are 2GB RAM and Core 2 Duo CPU. However, if you want to play PlayStation 3 games having very high fps, it is recommended to choose a PC with higher configurations. When you use PSeMu3, you can play games without having to deal with area settings. It doesn’t matter whether you are using a JP diversion circle or NA ISO file, it will run without any issues. Besides, you can also enjoy PS1/PS2 games without having to worry about the local settings.

ANX Emulator

  The ANX emulator is among the top PS3 emulators for PC that we came across. We found that it works with all the frameworks and with the latest Windows 10 OS and even with Mac OS. This PlayStation Emulator for PC also has a downloader that allows you to download a wide range of games which are compatible with the PS3. When it came to make the right choice, we chose God of Arena and several other major titles. We were amazed by the performance and gameplay. The Emulator by ANX also enables PlayStation remote. You can also use it with a wide range of remotes. When we used a remote, it worked flawlessly. It takes just 2 minutes to install the game after downloading.

RPCS3 Emulator

  The RPCS3 is one of the best PS3 emulators you can find for PC. It is freely available and among the best ASCII text files for both the PS3 and PS Vita. The emulator has been developed on C++ and has OpenGL, DirectX 12 and Vulkan in the back-end. This PS3 emulator is developed to run on all Windows platforms and even on UNIX. Currently, more than 147 games are compatible with this emulator. But using the best PS3 emulator for PC comes at a cost. It’s quite hard to set it up. If you don’t have advanced knowledge, it can take a lot of time and effort to set it. There’s so much to deal with, you are most likely to drop it in between and look for some other alternative. We spent around an hour to get everything and yet more files were needed. Even when we were able to put up everything, it were only the low-end games that could be played using the RPCS3 Emulator. Games like God of Arena were not in the list of 10 games we were able to play using it.

SNES9x Emulator

  The SNES9x stands for Super Nintendo Entertainment System and is a freeware. The PlayStation 3 emulator is developed for Windows 7. We were able to play most of the games developed for SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo systems on our Workstation/PC. We were able to play some major game titles which were specifically released for the Japan market. There is a long story behind the Snes9x. It took more than 3 years of effort involving hacking, coding/re-coding, and debugging. It is developed on C++ and is based on three assembler processor emulation cores for Windows and i386 Linux ports. The Snes9x was created by merging the Snes96 and Snes97 by Gary Henderson and Jerremy Koot, respectively. It has been embraced across many platforms. The emulator is the first to have emulated SNES’ enhancement chips at different levels. In fact, Snes9x is also the first one offering sound output. It also supports Cg shaders in v1.53. So if you want to play your favorite PS3 games on your PC, you should be able to find the right PS3 emulator for PC from the above list. They are free to use and offer different levels of ease for set up.