PS4 emulation in 2026: Bloodborne at 4K60 on PC, playable games doubled, shadPS4 spawns native ports

2026 is the year PS4 emulation went mainstream. In January, Digital Foundry showed Bloodborne running at a near-locked 4K60 in shadPS4. By November, entries marked Playable on shadPS4's compatibility list had grown from 179 a year earlier to 415. In October, the project's own online service, shadNet, brought Bloodborne online play to PC, and the same month a wave of native single-game PC ports appeared, built on shadPS4's renderer.

Bloodborne: from barely playable to 4K60

On January 17, 2026, Digital Foundry published "Bloodborne PC Emulation Can Now Exceed 4K at 60FPS - And It's Brilliant." The key findings:

• Near-locked 4K60: on an RTX 4080, 60 fps at 4K about 99% of the time. Weaker GPUs can get similar results at 1440p or 1080p.
• Higher frame rates: one crowded spot in Yharnam clears 80 fps at 4K, 100 at 1440p and 110 at 1080p.
• Shader cache: available since v0.13.0, it cuts the hitches when you first enter an area or swing a weapon, though some compilation stutter remains.
• Issues: odd jitter on swaying plants, some flickering textures, and above 120 fps the run button turns into slow sliding. DF recommends a 120 fps cap.
• Mods: fromsoftserve's Shadows of the Hunt (formerly Bloodborne Remaster Project, 15 GB) adds fully dynamic shadows and drops 4K to 45-65 fps.

DF's verdict: short of a real remaster from Sony, this is likely the best Bloodborne experience for years. It also named the exclusives that are still hard to emulate, such as The Last Guardian and The Order: 1886.

Eight stable releases

Playable games more than doubled

shadPS4's compatibility list tracks player reports per game entry. By status:

A game can have several entries for different regional versions, so these are not exact game counts, but the trend is clear. When v0.16.0 came out in June, Android Authority counted 111 playable games on Windows and 144 on Linux.

Games the team singled out this year:

• The Order: 1886: GPU fixes in the v0.18.1 WIP builds got it in-game. The team says "with a bit patient it can even be called playable," and some users report finishing it, though graphics issues and delays remain.
• Shadow of the Colossus: a kernel event flag rewrite in v0.18 stopped the frequent boot hang; it now reaches the menus consistently.
• Persona shadows, plus effects in inFAMOUS and Gravity Rush 2 (v0.18).
• Yakuza 6 menu squares and MediEvil shadow stripes fixed in v0.18.1 WIP; Attack on Titan 2 and The Surge 2 look playable.

Platforms: Mac and Intel

• Mac: v0.17 moved to KosmicKrisp, which the team says brings much better compatibility and speed. v0.20 added SSE4a CPU patches on macOS, and v0.21 worked around two Rosetta 2 mistranslations.
• Windows on 12th-gen and newer Intel: v0.18 added experimental red zone protection for crashes caused by Windows exception handling clobbering game stacks.
• Game files: v0.17 added ZArchive, so a game can live in one compressed file instead of 20,000 loose ones.

From emulator to single-game ports

On October 1, developer deadinside28 released bbport. The PS4's CPU is x86-64 already, so bbport runs Bloodborne's code directly on the PC's CPU, replaces the system libraries with a runtime written for that one game, and translates graphics to Vulkan with a renderer and shader recompiler that started from shadPS4's. Wccftech noted that shadPS4 forms the basis of the port's graphics side.

Over the following weeks the same approach reached God of War III Remastered, Driveclub, Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and more. DSOGaming reported that the God of War III port also uses game-specific fixes from cuesta4's shadPS4 fork. The developer of ChonkyStation4, another PS4 emulator, found a fix for shadPS4 too (credited in the v0.18 notes). More in our bbport story and October's wave of native PS4 ports.

What's still missing

• Frame rate ceiling: in DF's test, Bloodborne's running bug shows up above 120 fps.
• Compilation stutter: Bloodborne has no pre-launch shader compilation pass, and DF expects this to stay an issue in shadPS4.
• Tough exclusives: The Last Guardian and The Order: 1886 are still improving.
• Online: shadNet only covers features built on Sony's system libraries, not games on publishers' own servers.

What this means for players

If you have been waiting for Bloodborne on PC, shadPS4 in 2026 already looks and runs better than the PS4 original, and native ports like bbport go further on frame rate and keyboard and mouse. Other PS4 games vary a lot, so check compatibility first. See the shadPS4 page for requirements and platforms, the Bloodborne and Driveclub pages for those games, and the PC hub for the bigger picture.