We’re this close to having Bloodborne running natively on PC. ShadPS4, the pivotal emulator handling PlayStation 4 titles, has already made Bloodborne readily available on PC and at an incredible framerate, but running the game natively is the end goal and expectation of just about every Bloodborne fan out there.
And with this latest development, we’re edging ever closer to that reality, though we do admittedly still have a ways to go. BBport, as it’s known on GitHub, “runs the original PlayStation 4 executable of Bloodborne (CUSA03173, game version 1.09) directly on an x86-64 Linux PC,” and, as of recently, Windows. The developer claims it is not a “general emulator,” though huge chunks of it use the ShadPS4 as the backend to support this semi-native port of FromSoftware’s masterpiece.
“The game’s own x86-64 code executes natively; a small runtime written for this one game replaces the PS4 system libraries; the GPU work is translated to Vulkan by a renderer derived from shadPS4 and heavily extended for this game, including temporal upscaling with AMD FSR 3.1, FSR 4 and FSR 4.1.1,” the creators explain.
With AMD’s FSR upscaling baked into the port, the creator suggests they’ve been able to run the game at around 150 FPS with FSR set on Quality using “just” a 7800XT. It’s not the most powerful card by any means, and since FSR can run on everything and not just AMD cards, I can’t even imagine how well it would run on high-end Nvidia hardware, or even AMD’s top-of-the-line GPUs.
Though, honestly, an FPS that high is bound to break the game’s physics, as FromSoftware games are known to have engine-level ties to framerates to ensure the physics work properly, which is why titles like Elden Ring still run at 60 FPS.
Now, do keep in mind that this port is not a real, proper native Windows or Linux port of Bloodborne. It’s by far the closest we’ve gotten to that point, but shadPS4 and its emulation are still heavily utilized to make this thing work at all, and it appears that full playthroughs are yet to be verified by the community.
As the developer explains, “Without shadPS4 there would be no bbport: its renderer and shader recompiler are the base of the graphics side.”
But with enough time and Sony’s ignorance, we’re almost certainly going to get there.
