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 multiple versions, this build yielded optimal results on his system—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.
To mitigate visual glitches manifesting as 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 issues. No other significant mods are needed; the emulator incorporates a comprehensive menu for managing various performance tweaks. These options include enabling 60fps, scaling resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.
While occasional frame drops were observed, Bloodborne maintained a largely stable 60fps performance. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) resulted in enhanced visual fidelity, but came at the cost of decreased frame rates and increased instability, leading to frequent crashes. Consequently, Morgan advises sticking to 1080p (the PS4 native resolution) or 1152p for the best balance of performance and visual quality.
Morgan concluded that the very feasibility of PS4 emulation for Bloodborne is a remarkable feat by the ShadPS4 team. While acknowledging some remaining technical imperfections, he deemed the emulator's performance impressive.
