PS5 emulators are already making massive strides in compatibility and performance. A series of recent updates to major PS5 emulation projects have seen more and more games categorized as playable, even including notable AAA releases like Demon’s Souls and Astro Bot.
SharpEmu and KytyPS5 are arguably the two most notable PS5 emulator projects, and they both keep full compatibility lists of tested titles at their respective sites. Take note right now: neither emulator is yet a truly viable way to play PS5 games. You will experience bugs, visual glitches, and performance issues even in the tiny handful of games that actually boot right now.
But the mere fact that PS5 emulation is even at the fringe of viability right now is, frankly, mind-blowing. A SharpEmu dev who goes by Scarecrow tweets that “out of 55 tested games, 12 can now reach in-game, and 6 of them are fully playable at 60 FPS,” as of the latest update. The titles here are mostly small indie projects and retro collections – things like the Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered package – but progress is progress.
Over on KytyPS5, things are looking even more impressive. There, the Demon’s Souls remake was running at 30fps as of just a few weeks ago. “I have to admit, this one hurts a little,” Scarecrow said in a tweet at the time. “Demon’s Souls has been one of the milestones I’ve been chasing with SharpEmu for a long time, and seeing KyTyPS5 running it this well is both impressive and humbling.”
Within the past few days, users have been posting videos of Demon’s Souls running on KytyPS5 at upwards of 40 to 50fps. Granted, it takes a monstrous RTX 5090 and i9-14900K to get up to that frame rate and it’s still below the 60fps of the PS5 game’s performance mode, but again, this just shows how compatibility is progressing far faster than anyone could’ve predicted.
So why is PS5 emulation developing so much faster than, say, PS4 emulators did? Part of the answer seems to be AI. A video from Modern Vintage Gamer – which also demonstrates Astro Bot running at frame rates up to 30fps – suggests that “AI is a big part of this process now.”
The exact extent of AI use in either project isn’t 100% clear, though KytyPS5’s GitHub page says that AI tools are allowed for “research, reverse engineering, and development assistance,” while SharpEmu’s page says AI assistance is allowed for “research, reverse engineering, code generation, or documentation.” Both emulators are clear on one particular front: contributors have to actually understand and be able to explain any AI-assisted code that they submit.
Neither disclosure is entirely unlike the one employed by RPCS3, though the devs behind the PS3 emulator were begging contributors to “stop submitting AI slop code” just a few months ago. Reading between the lines, it seems devs are fed up with unskilled programmers who are using AI to craft code they don’t actually understand, as opposed to experienced devs using AI as an assistance tool. I guess the allure of vibecoding is just too powerful for people desperate to play PS5 exclusives on PC.