Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan conducted an in-depth evaluation of Bloodborne's performance on the ShadPS4 emulator, focusing on the advancements made by the modding community. For his analysis, Morgan utilized the ShadPS4 0.5.1 build developed by diegolix29, which is derived from raphaelthegreat's custom branch. This particular build demonstrated superior performance when tested on a PC equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor and a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, compared to other builds.
To enhance the gaming experience and address visual glitches, Morgan suggested the installation of the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. This mod effectively eliminates visual artifacts, such as stretched or misplaced polygons, although it does disable the character face customization feature at the start of the game. Fortunately, no additional mods are necessary as the emulator itself is equipped with a comprehensive menu for managing various enhancements. These include options to enable 60 fps gameplay, upscale the resolution to 4K, and turn off chromatic aberration.
Morgan observed that Bloodborne generally maintained a 60 fps frame rate, despite experiencing occasional stutters. He also experimented with higher resolutions, specifically 1440p and 1800p, which enhanced image quality but led to performance degradation and increased instances of crashes. Consequently, Morgan advises running Bloodborne on the ShadPS4 emulator at either 1080p, mirroring the PS4's native resolution, or at 1152p for optimal performance.
In his concluding remarks, Morgan praised the ShadPS4 team for their groundbreaking work in PS4 emulation, noting that while Bloodborne runs impressively on the emulator, there are still some technical challenges to overcome.
