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, meticulously evaluating its performance and the impressive technical enhancements crafted by the modding community. For his tests, Morgan utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, based on raphaelthegreat's custom branch. After experimenting with various builds, this version yielded the best results on his system—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor paired with a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.

Morgan strongly suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates distracting visual artifacts manifested as stretched or misaligned polygons. Notably, no other essential mods are needed; the emulator itself incorporates a comprehensive menu for managing various performance enhancements. This includes enabling 60fps support, scaling resolutions up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.

While occasional stutters were present, Morgan observed that Bloodborne maintained a mostly stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) resulted in noticeably improved visuals, but came at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, Morgan recommends sticking to 1080p (matching the PS4's native resolution) or 1152p for optimal gameplay.

Morgan concluded that the very existence of playable PS4 emulation for Bloodborne is a remarkable feat by the ShadPS4 team. While acknowledging remaining technical imperfections, he deemed the emulator's performance of Bloodborne highly successful.