The team behind RPCS3, a well-known PlayStation 3 emulator, has issued a warning about fraudulent emulators claiming to run PS3 games on mobile devices. These “scam” emulators are misleading users into believing that they can emulate PS3 games on Android or iOS platforms.
I believe it’s more a “the PS3 CPU architecture was an absolute nightmare and emulating it is difficult/slow” more than it had anything to do with the graphics rendering portion- which is typically where phones would have made the most substantial advancements. There are specific instruction sets that need to be supported by any CPU emulating PS3 to run anywhere near native speed… And I don’t believe much work has been done for ARM cpu’s to support the needed instructions in mobile devices.
I believe RCPS3 uses a translation layer in order to achieve its accuracy, so I think porting it would be relatively easy. Then again, the last words of any programer are that something should be relatively easy.