PSP Web Recomp Runs God of War in a Browser at 60FPS, Developer Says
The project's own first playable build ran at 6FPS, and snuri00's account of getting to 60FPS points to frame-swap timing, a fix borrowed from PPSSPP, rather than raw rendering speed as the bottleneck in static recompilation to WebAssembly.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
Software engineer snuri00 published PSP Web Recomp on GitHub, which runs PSP games in a browser without an emulator. A demo of God of War: Ghost of Sparta holds 60FPS in Chrome and Firefox, per snuri00, from boot through menus, cutscenes, and combat, at up to four times the PSP's resolution. Movie scenes are skipped. God of War: Chains of Olympus runs at 55FPS to 60FPS at up to three times native resolution.
The first playable build ran at 6FPS. Reaching 60FPS, per snuri00, came mostly from finding where processing time went rather than from speeding up the renderer. In God of War, the frame buffer is swapped without waiting for the vertical blank between display updates, so roughly eight frames were drawn for each one shown. Holding those swaps until the next blank, a technique PPSSPP also uses, cut the per-frame load to one eighth.
Hacker News commenters split on the label: one called it reverse-engineered and ported rather than emulated, another asked whether converting machine code to C++, recompiling to WebAssembly, and linking a reimplemented PSP OS and graphics chip is not an emulation stack by another name.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.