Bloodborne can be emulated on PC with almost stable 60 fps

Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan recently put Bloodborne through its paces using 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, he found this build yielded optimal results on his system—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.

To mitigate visual glitches manifesting as distorted or misplaced polygons, Morgan suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively resolves these graphical issues. No other mods are strictly necessary; the emulator incorporates a dedicated menu for managing performance enhancements, including 60fps support, resolutions up to 4K, and chromatic aberration toggles.

While occasional stuttering was observed, Morgan reported mostly stable 60fps performance. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) yielded improved visual fidelity but resulted in decreased frame rates and frequent crashes. Therefore, he recommends 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 via ShadPS4 is a remarkable feat. While acknowledging remaining technical imperfections, he declared Bloodborne's performance on the emulator to be largely successful.