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.
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 several performance enhancements directly into its interface. This includes a dedicated menu for adjusting settings such as enabling 60fps, scaling resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.
While occasional stutters were observed, Morgan reported that Bloodborne maintained a mostly stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) resulted in improved visual fidelity but came at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, Morgan recommends sticking to 1080p (the PS4 native resolution) or 1152p for optimal gameplay.
Morgan concluded that the very feasibility of PS4 emulation for Bloodborne is a remarkable feat by the ShadPS4 team. While acknowledging remaining technical imperfections, he highlighted the emulator's impressive ability to run Bloodborne with a high degree of success.
