Bloodborne can be emulated on PC with almost stable 60 fps

Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan recently put Bloodborne through its paces on the ShadPS4 emulator, analyzing its performance and the impact of community-created enhancements.

For his evaluation, Morgan utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, a build stemming from raphaelthegreat's custom branch. After testing various versions, this build yielded optimal results on his system: an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.

Morgan highlighted the benefits of the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While it disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates distracting visual glitches manifested as distorted or misplaced polygons. No other significant mods were necessary; the emulator incorporates a comprehensive menu for adjusting settings such as enabling 60fps, boosting resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.

While occasional stuttering was observed, Bloodborne maintained a mostly stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) resulted in enhanced visual fidelity, but at the cost of performance and increased instability, leading to frequent crashes. Therefore, Morgan suggests sticking to 1080p (native PS4 resolution) or 1152p for the best balance of performance and visuals.

Morgan concluded that the very existence of playable PS4 emulation through ShadPS4 is a remarkable feat of engineering. While acknowledging remaining technical imperfections, he deemed Bloodborne's performance on the emulator largely successful.