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 the modding community. His tests utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, based on raphaelthegreat's custom branch, chosen for its superior performance on his AMD Ryzen 7 5700X and GeForce RTX 4080 system after experimenting with several builds.
Morgan strongly advises installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates unsightly visual artifacts—stretched or misaligned polygons—significantly improving the visual experience. No other mods are necessary; the emulator itself incorporates a dedicated menu offering a range of enhancements, including 60fps support, resolutions up to 4K, and the option to disable chromatic aberration.
While occasional stutters were noted, Morgan found Bloodborne maintained a mostly stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) yielded sharper visuals, but came at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, he recommends sticking to 1080p (matching the PS4's native resolution) or 1152p for the optimal 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 remaining technical hurdles, he deemed the overall experience on the emulator to be quite successful.