The development team behind the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 has announced that it has successfully emulated Red Dead Redemption on the PC for the first time.

RPCS3 is an open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger written in C++ for Windows and Linux. The project began development on May 23, 2011, and currently supports most modern graphics APIs, including Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and OpenGL.

The emulator is said to be capable of booting and playing hundreds of games, through many 3D games are far from being fully playable.

The development team behind the emulator released the new Red Dead Redemption gameplay video last Saturday. For a long time, testers were unable to get past the game's main menu, but are now able to play the game at low frame rates for the first time.

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With recent improvements to graphics emulation thanks to Jarves the game can now continue to run without hanging and we can finally go ingame and control the (sometimes invisible) character.

With the improved LLVM recompiler by Nekotekina we reach about 3-15 fps depending on what is going on, a clear improvement from only showing the main menu at 1 fps a month ago.

Lastly kd-11 fixed a graphics bug that would cause almost everything in the game to be completely blue.

At its current stage of development, the PlayStation 3 emulator requires high-end hardware to power the emulation process. The Red Dead Redemption gameplay video that was released earlier this week was captured on a machine featuring a i7-4790k processor running at 4.9 GHz.

It is likely that RPCS3 running on older hardware will be able to emulate 3D games faster and faster as the development team continues to improve the emulator in the coming months.