Digital Foundry's Thomas Morgan recently put Bloodborne through its paces on the ShadPS4 emulator, meticulously analyzing its performance and the impact of community-created mods. His testing utilized ShadPS4 build 0.5.1 by diegolix29, based on raphaelthegreat's custom branch, chosen after evaluating several builds on his AMD Ryzen 7 5700X and GeForce RTX 4080 system.

Morgan strongly suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates distracting visual glitches manifested as distorted or misplaced polygons. No other mods are necessary; the emulator itself incorporates a comprehensive menu for managing enhancements. This includes enabling 60fps, boosting resolution up to 4K, and disabling chromatic aberration.

While occasional stutters were present, Morgan found Bloodborne maintained a largely stable 60fps framerate. Experiments with higher resolutions (1440p and 1800p) yielded improved visuals, but at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, he recommends sticking to 1080p (matching the PS4's native resolution) or 1152p for optimal stability.

Morgan concluded that the very existence of playable PS4 emulation for Bloodborne via ShadPS4 is a remarkable feat. While acknowledging remaining technical hurdles, he deemed the overall experience highly successful.