We all know by now that Microsoft does not plan to release Halo 3 on the PC (unless of course the Master Chief Collection comes to our platform). As such, PC gamers can only rely on emulation in order to play this classic console shooter. And we are happy to report that the Xbox 360 emulator, Xenia, can now boot and run the game.
Unfortunately, though, emulation is far from perfect at this point. As you will see below, there are a lot of graphical glitches and performance is all over the place. Seriously, this does not feel like Halo 3 due to all the graphical issues and it is nowhere close to be labelled as playable, however it’s pretty amazing witnessing the emulator finally running the game.
Naturally, there is currently no ETA on when Xenia will be able to run Halo 3 without any graphical glitches and at acceptable framerates. We are pretty certain that in 2019 we may be able to achieve something like that but by then, and if 343 Industries’ claims are anything to go by, Microsoft may have already released Halo MCC on the PC.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Already looks better than Mass Effort Andromeda
why rcpcs3 is making faster progress than this? i though the 360 hardware was less complicated to emulate than the ps3 hardware?
Perhaps this is using high level emulation rather than low level. Happened with the OG xbox, too
Probably because ps3 emu has 3x the contributors working on it then xenia does.
PS3 uses single core PowerPC CPU… Xbox 360 uses 3-core PoiwerPC CPU
Sony used Cell CPU which was build from 1 core of main CPU (PowerPC) and 7 simple math co-processors called SPE very similar to standard compute units from GPU. You don’r need to emulate SPE because you can map that co-processor to GPU. You only need to emulate single core main PowerPC used by game logic
Xbox 360 is harder to emulate because it use 3-core PowerPC CPU. It is harder to emulate multithreading logic. Xbox 360 was much faster than PS3. Main CPU was 3x faster, GPU uses 48 unified shaders (PS3 uses only 24 pixel shaders, 8 vertex shaders), programmable operations direct in GDDR memory (antialiasing without using GPU or CPU)
That explain a lot but xbox 360 xenon cpu was 3x faster if you dont count the spu’s devs could offload both cpu ans gpu task to the available spu’s but doing that was difficult and was a completely different aproach to developing games on pc and 360 who were kinda simillar…thats why only sony exclusives looked much better than 360 exclusives but multiplatform games most of them looked and ran better on 360 due to dev just porting over from the 360 instead of trying to offload graphics tasks to the spu’s,the less capable rsx was handling all gpu intensive tasks and the fact the ps3 had less ram and did not have edram was mostly why multiplatform games were worse on the ps3.
you need to check out the original story behind PS3 development. especially the part about in-house GPU development and stop repeating that marketing buzzwords crap. no eDRAM can give you shader model 4.0 and unified shader units, it was just dedicated high speed framebuffer with anti-aliasing as a option. PS3 had no real anti-piracy protection at all. 360 was fully virtualized environment with CPU and DVD keys combination unique for each machine used for encrypting stuff, just try to pull out x360 hdd from one machine and put it on another and try to run some downloaded/installed stuff from it!
Its far less complicated but it seems people would much rather play ps3 games so its getting far more support. The only game worth emulating the system for (for most people) would be halo
PS3 is much easier to emulate (1 core PowerPC CPU)… Xbox uses 3-core PowerPC CPU. Also Xbox uses much more faster GPU and programmable GDDR memory (developers can create simple programs like AA ops executed by memory chips without using GPU or CPU)
Yea, no. I saw the exact same comment you posted below but its wrong on every level.
1) Cell is singlecore pos
2) Xenon is 3core 6 thread
3) RSX is PS3.0 garbage dated from 2005 era
4) Xenos is PS4.0 capable with unified shader architecture+UMA capabillityes and have dedicated high speed eSRAM module who can provide up to 4X sample anti-aliasing
5) X360 technicaly is Denuvo on hardware level, cause of that is hard to emulate.
And yet ps3 exclusives were better and also better looking.
Yes the rsx is less capable than the xenos and ps3 have less ram dedicated for gaming…but calling the cell a single core pos? Powerpc architectures is different than conventional x86 cpu and actually the xbox 360 3 core 6 thread are very lackluster compared to 2007 core 2 duo and the ps3 cpu could offload to the 6 available spu’s cpu and gpu intensive task but that seemed like a very conplicated task for developers because it was noncoventional, thats why toward the endlife of the some multiplat games were better on ps3 like gta5 and la noire.
gamingreality . com/2013/09/gta-v-xbox-360-vs-ps3-screenshot.html
Cell had 7 functioning cores. Most developers only used 1 because it made it function similarly to a pentium. The other 6 were intended for secondary tasks but many people ignored them completely because they were hard to access and optimize for.
this cr@p start reminds me “blast processing” buzzword from 4th gen era! those vectoring operating engines which Sony PR call “cores” are just remains from scraped in-house own GPU development atempt which floped very badly and costed for Sony ~3 billions USD. ATI Xenos got that functional from the start.
I guess you are right apart gears of war 2 and 3 and halo 3,reach and halo 4 there is nothing else i care about on the 360…
Thats why back then i told my bro to get the ps3 so we could enjoy the best of this gen(he could play on my pc and i could play on his ps3 ^^)
Truth be told the Xbox 360 never had that many exclusives that people were DYING to play. Uncharted was awesome, God of war was awesome, The Last of Us etc etc… I like Microsoft as a company because they make the very OS that most of us are using right now, but oh my god they dropped the ball on exclusives last gen and this gen. PS3 has cooler games, X360 emulation feels like just a side-project from a few dudes.
Most X360 games on PC and more PS3 exclusives people really want to play.
What would be hilarious is if they announced the Halo:MCC for PC at E3. These guys would just die inside I bet.
I’d still like to get Fable 2 on pc
Are you dumb? The emulator isn’t built just to run Halo on PC. It’s a XBOX 360 emulator.
Each game that runs on the emulation software requires some work (Small or large) on the part of the developer of the emulator itself. Some games never see compatibility, and this goes back to N64 emulation. So working on Halo 3 and getting everything good enough to rock and roll would be all to waste if Microsoft announces a fully compatible PC version with it’s own features and graphical options.
You assume to know what I know and don’t know, which is to your folly since you made yourself out to be as out of touch as you clearly think other people are. After you’re done taking a cold shower after reading my comment, remember to tread carefully when dealing with me in the future. Is Tracer autistic in Overwatch lore? You seem to be on the ‘spectrum’.
RDR(x360 is well optimized than PS3 version), Gears of War 2 and 3, Fable 2, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon
I can see the point of PS3 emulator. You have the Uncharted series, Demon’s Souls, Ni no Kuni, Killzone games, God of War, GT series, other PS3 exclusive jrpg games. Most X360 games are on the PC. I guess the Halo games.
There’s still a decent chunk of exclusives that will be lost to time without a proper emulator.
DOA4, DOAX2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, Rumble Roses XX, Onechanbara, Infinite Undiscovery, just to name some of the Japanese ones.
(And before anyone says NG2 came out on PS3, that version was garbage)
Kindly get lost with your console gameplay on a PC website.
don’t you have some sale figures to make up?