The emulation of Sony’s current-generation console is gaining momentum, and this is happening just as the company is halting PC ports.
A few days ago, we reported that Grand Theft Auto V is playable on the KyTyPS5 PlayStation 5 emulator. Who knows? Grand Theft Auto VI may also be playable on PC via emulation before Rockstar releases an official port. In light of the emulator’s latest developments, this timeline no longer seems so far-fetched. With a single update, the emulator improved from 2 FPS to between 10 and 18 FPS when running Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls Remake. That’s an 800% improvement! And this game isn’t the only example. Team Asobi’s excellent platformer Astro Bot can now be launched for the first time and runs at around 11 FPS on a fairly modest setup: an Intel Core i3-10105F CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU.
Visually, Astro Bot is in much worse shape than Demon’s Souls because it struggles with significant rendering issues. The important thing, though, is that it runs at all. With this update, the total number of playable AAA titles on the emulator has risen to three, and indie titles can also be run (e.g., Stray). One important caveat is worth mentioning clearly. There are rumors circulating in the emulation community that these sudden leaps in performance are due to AI-generated code, though this has not yet been confirmed. Moreover, AI-generated code is now used to assist with all sorts of tasks, so this wouldn’t be all that surprising. The build is reportedly not yet on GitHub but is expected to appear soon. For a long time, SharpEmu seemed to be the most capable PlayStation 5 emulator on the market. However, the progress that KyTyPS5 has made in recent weeks has likely made it the new leader.
This is more than just a curiosity for hardware and emulation enthusiasts because Sony has changed its approach to PC releases. Single-player titles will no longer be released the way they were during the God of War and Horizon eras. However, we’re not yet at the point where PlayStation 5 games can be emulated on PC perfectly enough to look and run as well as—or better than—they do on the PlayStation 5 Pro. If this pace continues, however, it won’t be long before that happens, which would make gamers very happy, given Sony’s long string of blunders in recent times.
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