What we know so far: Just a year ago, it seemed unthinkable that PC users would soon be able to emulate PlayStation 5 games in any meaningful way. However, recent changes in Sony’s policy seem to have stimulated several related projects in recent months. While only a handful of games are currently playable and the larger 3D titles run at unstable frame rates, the trend is definitely worth seeing due to the speed of development.
In just a few months, at least two PS5 emulators have gone from having no public release to having one of the console’s only truly exclusive games, the Demon’s Souls remake, with playable frame rates. New test versions are released quickly on the GitHub pages for SharpEmu and KytyPS5, in the case of KytyPS5 even several times a day, as more and more videos show their progress on YouTube.
While some recent clips show SharpEmu and KytyPS5 only hitting single-digit frame rates in Demon’s Souls, others show the latter hitting 40 to 50 fps on an RTX 5090 and an Intel Core i9-14900K. One clip even shows the game hitting 120fps with DLSS frame generation, in addition to constant 30fps rendering.
Astro Bot is another PS5 exclusive game that has hit playable, if still unstable, frame rates in recent days. Even Wolverine, which released just two weeks ago, can now reach its main menu on PC, albeit at around 2 frames per second.
The timing suggests that most, if not all, of the public developments occurred after Sony moved to reduce PC ports and eliminate physical disks. SharpEmu went public in July, months after initial reports that Sony would be withdrawing PC support. The first of KytyPS5’s more than 300 GitHub releases appeared the same month, about two weeks after the company announced it would stop producing discs for new PlayStation games starting in 2028.
Although both projects accept AI-generated code, they have clear guidelines regarding its use, apparently to avoid accusations of “vibe coded slop” that have recently become widespread in the retro modding scene. Contributors need to be able to describe what their code does and test it manually.
While the two projects aim to bring PS5 exclusive games to PC through emulation, a third project is taking a different approach: running the games natively. AnyPS5 converts executable files developed for the Sony console into formats that Windows or Linux can read, similar to compatibility layers like Wine or Proton.
The method is plausible because the PS5, like most Windows and Linux systems, is x86-based. So far, AnyPS5 has only publicly demonstrated one game, the 2D platformer Dreaming Sarah, but it manages 60fps on just a GTX 1050 Ti and an i5-7500, hardware that predates the PS5 by several years. Even a 2016 integrated Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU can exceed 30 fps. However, the project has not released a public build yet.
Still, it is difficult to predict future advances in emulators and compatibility layers. ShadPS4, a PlayStation 4 compatibility layer that greatly inspired AnyPS5, is still in early development several years after its debut.
