Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan conducted an in-depth review of Bloodborne on the ShadPS4 emulator, focusing on the game's performance and the technical enhancements introduced by modders.
For his analysis, Morgan utilized the ShadPS4 0.5.1 build by diegolix29, which is derived from the custom branch developed by raphaelthegreat. He found this build to be the most effective among those he tested, using a setup equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU.
Morgan suggested the installation of the Vertex Explosion Fix mod, which is crucial for eliminating visual glitches such as stretched or mispositioned polygons. While this mod disables the ability to customize the character's face at the start, it effectively fixes these visual issues. Notably, no other mods are necessary as the emulator itself comes with built-in enhancements. These can be accessed through a dedicated menu, allowing users to enable 60 fps support, boost resolution to 4K, or turn off chromatic aberration.
Despite occasional stutters, Morgan observed that Bloodborne generally maintained a 60 fps frame rate. He also experimented with higher resolutions, specifically 1440p and 1800p, which enhanced image detail but led to performance degradation and frequent crashes. Consequently, Morgan advises running Bloodborne on the ShadPS4 emulator at either 1080p, mirroring the original PS4 experience, or at 1152p for optimal performance.
Morgan praised the ShadPS4 team for their remarkable achievement in making PS4 emulation possible. He concluded that while Bloodborne performs well on the emulator, there are still some technical challenges that need to be addressed.
