Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan recently put Bloodborne through its paces on the ShadPS4 emulator, meticulously evaluating its performance and the impressive technical enhancements crafted by dedicated modders. For his tests, Morgan utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, a build based on raphaelthegreat's custom branch. After experimenting with various builds, this version delivered the best results on his system—an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor paired with a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.
To optimize the visual experience, Morgan suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. This mod effectively eliminates distracting visual artifacts—stretched or misplaced polygons—though it does disable pre-game character face customization. Notably, no other essential mods are needed; ShadPS4 incorporates a comprehensive menu allowing users to fine-tune various enhancements, including enabling 60fps support, boosting resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.
While occasional stutters were observed, Morgan found Bloodborne maintained a largely stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) yielded noticeable improvements in image detail, but came at the cost of performance and increased frequency of crashes. Consequently, he recommends playing at either the native PS4 resolution of 1080p or a slightly upscaled 1152p for the best balance of visual fidelity and stability.
Morgan concluded that the very existence of playable PS4 emulation for Bloodborne is a remarkable feat by the ShadPS4 team. While acknowledging some remaining technical hurdles, he deemed the overall experience highly successful.
