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 analyzing its performance and the impact of community-created mods. For his evaluation, Morgan utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, based on raphaelthegreat's custom branch. After testing various builds, this version proved optimal on his system—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor paired with a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.

To achieve the best visual fidelity, Morgan strongly suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates distracting visual artifacts like stretched or misplaced polygons. Notably, no other mods are necessary; ShadPS4 incorporates a comprehensive menu allowing users to adjust settings such as enabling 60fps support, boosting resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.

While occasional stutters were present, Morgan observed that Bloodborne maintained a largely stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) yielded improved detail, but 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 the best balance of performance and visual quality.

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 praised the emulator's overall success in bringing this challenging title to PC.