Bloodborne PC Emulation Can Now Exceed 4K at 60FPS - And It's Brilliant

In the era of the remaster and the remake, one game stands alone as the biggest missed opportunity of the generation. Over five years since the launch of PlayStation 5 and getting on for 11 years since it first debuted on PS4, Bloodborne remains untouched by Sony and developer FromSoftware, locked to a wobbly 1080p at a wobbly 30 frames per second whatever console you play it on.

Enter ShadPS4, a PC emulator that remains deep in development, but plays host to an enhanced Bloodborne experience that recently received a vast boost to performance. Improved resolution and unlocked frame-rates are joined by a wealth of graphics mods. Short of a full remaster/remake from Sony, this is likely the best Bloodborne experience we'll see for years to come.

In the past, we've seen how mods for the original PS4 game can run Bloodborne at 60fps on exploited or development PlayStation 5s via backwards compatibility. To reach similarly smooth performance on PC (hardware specs permitting), we recommend enabling the FIFO v-sync method and async logging in ShadPS4's game-specific settings. For visuals at resolutions higher than 1080p, make sure to increase the emulator's DRAM allocation by 6,000MB and boost the v-blank frequency to 9,999Hz. Skipping these steps will lead to a fever dream of non-loaded textures and visual distortions, owing to the original code expecting PS4-level limits without those tweaks.

Then right-click Bloodborne in the ShadPS4 interface to select "cheats and patches," which opens up other optional and important toggles. The most important ones are a "tasksplit" patch, "increased graphics heap sizes" and processor-specific workarounds like the "Intel 12 + SFX" patch. This is also the place to select aspects like pixel resolution, target frame-rate, unlocked frame-rates, increased level-of-detail (LOD) and disabling default options like chromatic aberration and motion blur.

Should your own Bloodborne emulation sessions have lingering visual issues after applying these tweaks, as a last resort solution you can grab the Vertex Explosion Fix mod from NexusMods. This mod disables facial customisation - a price arguably worth paying to get less bug-prone 4K Bloodborne gameplay.

One other feature that's relatively new to ShadPS4 as of version 0.13.0 is shader caching. Without this enabled, Bloodborne suffers from 120ms+ frame-time spikes as you first turn into any new map segment, strike an enemy or use a blood vial for the first time. Our 4K Bloodborne testing held 60fps 99 percent of the time with shader caching disabled, but these outlier hiccups do stand out.

Enabling shader caching reduces follow-up stuttering blips in these respective moments and is generally recommended for an overall smoother experience - though it will still show some blips and shader compilation stutter. As the game doesn't support any kind of pre-launch shader compilation pass, this will likely be an omnipresent issue for ShadPS4 emulation.

With those copious instructions and notes out of the way, we can repeat the good news: 4K Bloodborne on PC is now absolutely viable at a nearly locked 60fps on an RTX 4080, and lesser GPUs can expect to scale down to resolutions like 1440p or 1080p with similar results. The emulator is still a work in progress, with mildly noticeable weirdness like unnatural jitter on swaying plants or flickering textures, but we can now expect hours of uninterrupted play before running into such issues - meaning, we're a long way from the crashes and bugs of our older ShadPS4 tests.

Physics, cloth movement and object destruction are in place. Textures, lighting, and enemy AI are a match for the PS4 version. And improved geometry LODs run without any apparent impact to performance to greatly minimise object pop-in.

Running the game above 60fps confirms intense maxing of many of our CPU's available threads, yet even so, the game's most intensive moments - like the Yharnam bonfire with dozens of foes - clear the 80fps line. Our trouble actually emerges when frame-rates climb too high, with anything above 120fps leading to a bug where the game's "run" button leads to slow, sliding movement.

Perhaps an animation-coding fix could emerge for Bloodborne on ShadPS4, and we'd love to see it since we can confirm absurdly high frame-rates are possible at lower resolutions on our testing rig. The same 80fps max at the processor-intensive Yharnam bonfire climbs to 100fps at 1440p and 110fps at 1080p on the same testing rig - and those numbers would soar even higher in areas like the Hunter's Dream Hub. Until we get any fix, however, you'll want to set a 120fps cap to play it safe.

Should you wish to play around further with Bloodborne's artistic direction and imagine a "remastered" experience, we recommend settling on Shadows of the Hunt, developed by modder fromsoftserve (cheeky name, there). This 15GB download was previously known as Bloodborne Remaster Project, and it's advanced significantly since we last tested its original version.

The mod package's biggest highlight is fully dynamic shadow casting, which replaces the baked shadows in the vanilla game and generally looks impressive. Worth noting, its range of sun-based and point light-based shadows can very rarely lead to flickering when a shadow doesn't quite resolve properly. This happens infrequently enough to make this option in the mod worth enabling for most users.

Personal taste, meanwhile, may impact how many additional toggles you might select. Tweaked parallel maps give a greater sense of height and depth to surface materials like cobblestones. PBR values are changed to make various surfaces look more reflective or less dewy-wet, to better resemble the material reaction characteristics of later FromSoftware titles like Dark Souls 3.

And a new Reshade profile injects changes like temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in place of the original game's FXAA, an updated MXAO in place of the original screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and updated colour grading.

Mix and match these tweaks to your heart's content - so long as system memory isn't taxed on your system of choice, as the mod can bring performance down significantly. Our testing rig drops to an unlocked frame-rate range of 45-65fps at 4K resolution with the mod's effects enabled, and reducing the pixel resolution to 1440p only barely approaches a locked 60fps frame-rate.

We know that work continues on optimising ShadPS4 to more capably run other PS4 software that never received bespoke PS5 patches, and we look forward to better results in the future for tricky-to-emulate console exclusives like The Last Guardian and The Order: 1886.