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.
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 iteration yielded the best results on his system—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.
Morgan suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates distracting visual glitches manifested as distorted or misplaced polygons. No other mods are strictly necessary; ShadPS4 incorporates a built-in menu for managing performance enhancements, including 60fps support, resolutions up to 4K, and chromatic aberration toggling.
While occasional stutters were present, Bloodborne generally maintained a stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) resulted in improved visual fidelity, but at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, Morgan recommends sticking to 1080p (native PS4 resolution) or 1152p for optimal gameplay.
Morgan concluded that the very existence of playable PS4 emulation via ShadPS4 is a remarkable feat. While Bloodborne's performance on the emulator isn't flawless, it's demonstrably impressive, considering the technical challenges involved.
