RSXGL working and usable

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Hi everyone!

When the PS3 homebrew scene started, a lot of people were complaining that it wasn’t possible to write 3D games for the PS3 because of its lack of OpenGL library.
Almost a year ago, Alex Betts thought he would tackle this problem and he started working on RSXGL… an implementation of the OpenGL 3.1 specification written from scratch targeting the PS3’s RSX. Anyone in their right mind would say that it’s impossible, that it’s too much work, but Alex spent the last year working on it, alone, until it became usable. You can read some news about it here.
For some reason though, no one used it to build their own apps. Maybe the status of the project was scaring them, it was said to be incomplete, there was no GLSL support, etc…
I am writing today to tell you that RSXGL is perfectly usable! It supports online GLSL compilation, as well as any feature you might want. As proof, I have written a new hardware accelerated engine for the EFL using RSXGL and it worked great! Alex and I spent a lot of time testing and fixing all the issues that were in RSXGL that were made visible by the EFL’s GL engine and I am happy to say that it’s working now. Expedite is able to run most of its tests at 50 to 60 fps on 1080p resolution (instead of the average of 5 to 10 fps it had on 720p before).
You can see performance tests right here (Running some tests from expedite) :
Software rendering: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22642664/expedite_psl1ght.log
RSXGL rendering: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22642664/expedite_rsxgl.log

Please give RSXGL a try. Also, you can get the latest EFL version from my repository, which includes the gl engine for ps3. Now, any EFL application will be automatically hardware accelerated thanks to RSXGL. I hope we can see some new games (or old GL games being ported) soon!

RSXGL : https://github.com/gzorin/RSXGL
EFL : https://github.com/kakaroto/e17

Enjoy!

29 thoughts on “RSXGL working and usable”

  1. Nice to see!
    Does this mean that it will be possible for homebrew apps creator to port/modify a game like minecraft to let it run on the ps3

    • It’s possible.. it depends if minecraft is open source, and if it depends on other libraries other than openGL that haven’t been ported yet. But yes, OpenGL games should be able to get ported now.

      • When minecraft is done, the creator said it would be open source
        And the minecraft i have running on my iPhone doesnt need java only OpenGL

    • Minecraft will never work well on PS3 in its current state. Minecraft runs on Java, which alone is horribly slow, and the architecture of the PS3 makes it even slower. Unless they decide to rewrite Minecraft for the PS3, I doubt you’ll ever see it run at an acceptable speed.

  3. Wow!! i will try it immediately 🙂
    GREAT JOB!! 🙂 🙂

    I’m building the new EFL version now!!

    • Thanks! The difference between the gl engine and the psl1ght engine is that the psl1ght one will auto-scale your screen to fit the resolution, the gl-psl1ght engine will not, so you have to resize your window to one of the acceptable resolutions or use ecore-psl1ght to get the list of resolutions the ps3 supports..
      The auto-scaling is planned though, I just don’t know how to use the opengl pbuffers…

  6. I have no wish or desire to engage in any past feuds including the few times I have antagonized the author of this blog along with a guy who seems in retrospect to be a bit of a nut – what is done is done and hopefully with another year behind us we are all a bit more mature (myself included) and can focus on development instead of pointless childish bickering that gets nobody anywhere.

    In that light I have been working for some time on a PSL1GHT port of RetroArch and fully intend on using RSXGL with it.

    So, people can choose between the PSL1GHT port and the PS3 SDK version shortly from now – I still have no idea if any kind of runtime GLSL shader compiler is available for RSXGL but that would certainly be nice considering the PS3 SDK version has cgrtc and it’s a chief part of the overall design.

    Kudos to Kakaroto for helping out with RSXGL finally – I can get behind PSL1GHT now with at least a GL backend.

  7. Awesome! Excellent work! This opens a new world of possibility!

    Screw Sony and their closed-source system. Imagine the amount of support and development, and involvement that the community could have had if Sony had an open SDK for the PS3.
    Shame on them.

    I hope to see an port of Mupen64Plus from some developer some time in the future 😉

  8. Xebozone: The big problem there is getting a dynarec to run on CFW PS3 in the first place, a hardware-based implementation of GL was never the problem in that respect.

    On PSJailbreak/PSGroove you could build a dynarec around Kammy – I don’t think any real effort has gone into figuring out how to do it for CFW PS3 – and Kammy was never ported to 3.55 either.

  10. When is new jailbreak going to come can you please tell us? Are you working on it or did you quit?

  15. He just released something way, way more awesome than a 4.11 jb. Appreciate this, please.
    Thanks kakarato, this’ll be a fun toy to have 😀

    • Thanks for that 🙂
      However, I didn’t release RSXGL, I merely announced this on behalf of gzorin (Alex), as for the RSXGL EFL engine, it was nothing and it wouldn’t have been possible without gzorin’s work on RSXGL.

  17. Hi,

    I am not a programmer but could you build an RDP (remote desktop client) based on this lib for the PS3 ?

    Gtx,
    Metalhead-666

    • no this is not a jailbreak -_- RSX is the PS3 GPU Chip and GL is a sort of engine wich some games needed (correct me if iam wrong)

      and when there will be a “Jailbreak” it will be in an other topic and KaKaRoTo makes/has a HEN HomebrewENabler, no jailbreak

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