As Sony remains determined to kill physical media for good starting in 2028, those opposing the idea have rolled up their sleeves and are working to make all PlayStation games—whether physical or otherwise—preservable on the one platform where that’s actually possible: the PC.
Several PlayStation 5 emulators are up and running at the moment, but one of them, KytyPS5, has been making tremendous progress recently, jumping from one milestone to the next within weeks, whereas emulators of yore needed years to achieve the same. Now, players are getting Demon’s Souls Remake, a crucially important PS5 exclusive, to run and play at around 50 FPS.
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And not only are the framerates quite smooth and satisfying, but it also appears that the game is running without any major graphical glitches, nor does it seem to be unstable and prone to crashing during these first few segments. Things do seem a little sped up, probably to account for some internal lag and slow-motion animations, but that’s just one of the hurdles the emulator will need to surpass to achieve actual broad playability.
The footage above is running on an Nvidia RTX 5090, so while the emulator does show a lot of promise, we’re still a bit far from the average Joe having the means to take it for a proper spin. Emulators always need the beefiest hardware in their early days, so it’s not surprising to see the best GPU on the market used to test everything and iron out any potential problems.
At any rate, the speed at which these PS5 emulators are developing is astonishing, and I didn’t expect to see an actual PS5-only game running this well this soon, the $5000 GPU be damned. While emulation on multi-platform games is progressing much better due to their better compatibility with non-PS5 hardware, it’s amazing to see Demon’s Souls Remake in particular progress, since that’ll give emulator developers the tools and understanding necessary to tackle other PS5 exclusives and improve performance across the board.
AstroBot is also making some great strides on the emulator, and I cannot wait to see what milestone this tech will reach next.
