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 builds, this version yielded the best performance on his system: an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.
To mitigate visual glitches—specifically, 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 artifacts. No other mods are 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 frame drops were observed, Morgan reported a largely stable 60fps experience. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) resulted in enhanced visual fidelity but came at the cost of significant performance degradation and frequent crashes. Therefore, Morgan recommends sticking to 1080p (matching the PS4 version) or 1152p for optimal gameplay.
Morgan concluded that the very existence of functional PS4 emulation, as demonstrated by ShadPS4, is a remarkable feat. While acknowledging remaining technical imperfections, he deemed Bloodborne's performance on the emulator highly commendable.
