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.

Morgan's tests utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, a build based on raphaelthegreat's custom branch. After experimenting with various builds, this version delivered optimal results on his system (AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and GeForce RTX 4080 GPU).

He strongly suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod to mitigate visual glitches manifesting as distorted or misplaced polygons. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively resolves significant graphical bugs. No other mods are necessary; the emulator incorporates a comprehensive menu for managing performance tweaks. This includes enabling 60fps, scaling resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.

While occasional stuttering was observed, Bloodborne maintained a mostly stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with 1440p and 1800p resolutions yielded improved visuals, but at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, Morgan recommends sticking to 1080p (native PS4 resolution) or 1152p for optimal stability.

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 largely successful.