The fence wait at the head of generate() blocked for up to a second on the previous slot's work. When it actually waited, the long frame interval it produced went straight into the pacer -- whose clock is sampled after this point -- and any interval over 100ms trips MINIMUM_BASE_RATE and stops generation for a full second (FrameGenPacer.cpp:29/40/97-100). So a stall here made the pacer stand down, and it was measuring a rate we had slowed ourselves. Measured against that: the pacer asked for a generated frame on only ~40% of real frames, which matches one >100ms interval every couple of seconds costing a second of generation each time. A zero timeout asks whether the previous frame's work is done and skips this frame if it is not. Skipping costs one generated frame; stalling cost a second of them. With three rotating slots the work has three frames to finish, and it measures ~3ms, so skips should be rare. VK_TIMEOUT is now a normal outcome rather than an error, so only real failures -- VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST being the one actually suspected here -- reach the counter that disables the feature.
ARMSX3
Uses the latest RPCS3 upstream code (the recent ARM64 improvements included).
Building
arm64-v8a and armv8.2 is supported. You need the Android SDK with NDK r27 or newer, CMake 3.30 or newer, and a JDK 17. Android Studio ships all of these.
Clone with submodules, then fetch the two third party checkouts that are not submodules:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/ARMSX2/ARMSX3.git
cd ARMSX3
git clone https://github.com/SnowflakePowered/librashader 3rdparty/librashader
git clone https://github.com/bylaws/libadrenotools android/armsx3-ui/app/src/main/cpp/libadrenotools
Build the core. This is the long part and produces an unstripped library of around 1.3 GB:
export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Library/Android/sdk
cmake -B build-android -G Ninja \
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$ANDROID_HOME/ndk/<version>/build/cmake/android.toolchain.cmake \
-DANDROID_ABI=arm64-v8a -DANDROID_PLATFORM=android-31 \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build build-android --target rpcsx-android -j8
Strip it and put it where the app expects it:
llvm-strip --strip-unneeded build-android/android/libarmsx3-core.so
cp build-android/android/libarmsx3-core.so \
android/armsx3-ui/app/src/main/jniLibs/arm64-v8a/
Then build the app:
cd android/armsx3-ui
export JAVA_HOME="/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home"
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease
The apk lands in app/build/outputs/apk/release/.
Note that the core library has to be rebuilt and copied again whenever anything under rpcs3/ or android/src/ changes. Gradle does not build it for you.
The Discord Social SDK is proprietary and is not redistributed here. Get it from Discord's developer portal and drop it in app/libs/ and app/src/main/cpp/discord_sdk/ if you want that feature. The build skips it otherwise.
Running it needs PS3 firmware, which is not included. License
GPL-2.0-only, the same as RPCS3. See LICENSE. Some files may be licensed differently, check the file headers.
Based on RPCS3, https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3