Despite launching on the PS3 more than a decade ago, God of War 3 remains a high point in the venerable series. The last of the Greece-era games before the series was switched to Norse mythology for PS4's God of War, the third entry was remastered for PlayStation 4 but has never been officially ported to PC.
However, using a PlayStation emulator, a modder has transformed the 2010 game by adding major visual upgrades. Giulio Guglielmi, who's known as Massihancer, has made some tweaks in a mod that works with the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 to dramatically increase the resolution of God of War 3.
With his mod, God of War 3 on PC, via the emulator, can now run a more stable 8K (7680x4320) and with ray-tracing. Massihancer is using a top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card to achieve this, and with the right hardware the mod makes the 12-year-old game appear in a brand-new light.
Quite literally, in some senses. As there is a dedicated ReShade preset and a global illumination shader. Even with those settings and ray-tracing turned off, the game's visuals still holds up well. In terms of lighting and environmental expansiveness, Sony's Santa Monica Studio did impressive work on the once-PS3 exclusive.
But in the above YouTube video that shows comparisons - when the settings have been maxed, with 8K and global illumination and ray-traced reflections turned on, the realism of the levels, the way fire, lamps and sky-light bounces off textures are significantly improved. You will need a monitor able to display the resolutions, of course, but in 8K I'm sure the crispiness of the game's crushing combat takes on a whole new, meatier level of detail.
It's pretty good work considering it's all being run through a PS3 emulator. Massihancer has a Patreon should those suitably impressed want to support and get more details. It's always fun to see such care over old games and the Italian modder has previous in creating such work.
Meanwhile, the recent God of War PC port is already getting mods, some of which are aimed at improving visuals. Further down the line, perhaps we can expect the PS4 game looking greatly transformed on PC considering how skilled some of these mods can be in maximising the look of a game, as we've seen for Skyrim and GTA 5.