On July 1st, we informed you about a new Playstation 4 emulator for the PC from the creators of RPCS3. And, after just a month, RPCSX can finally run the first PS4 game with 60fps.
YouTube’s ‘BrutalSam’ has shared the following gameplay video, showcasing Sonic Mania running via RPCSX. And although this is a 2D game (and not a demanding one), it’s incredible witnessing this new Playstation 4 emulator running the game at full speed.
In order to capture this gameplay video, BrutalSam used an Intel Core i7 6700K with 8GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. BrutalSam has also included some performance stats that give us a better idea about the current PC requirements of RPCSX. And, as the YouTuber noted, video recording reduced the overall framerate by 10fps.
As we can see, RPCSX requires a high-end CPU. For even running this 2D game, the PS4 emulator used all of the available CPU power of the i7 6700K. On the other hand, GPU usage sits at 30-40%. And… well… this was to be expected. After all, Sonic Mania is a 2D game.
Anyway, in just a month, the developers of RPCSX were able to boot and run a PS4 game. That’s amazing news. Not only that, but RPCSX is the first Playstation 4 emulator that can even boot Bloodborne.
So, even if Sony never ports Bloodborne on PC, we might be able to play it on PC via this emulator. And to be honest, this is currently the only PS4 game that most PC gamers want to play. Okay okay, there are also Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian.
You can download the latest public version of RPCSX from here.
Enjoy the following video and stay tuned for more!

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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At least in theory, the overall CPU requirements should still be lower than RPCS3, because there is no PowerPC + SPUs (Cell’s CPU architecture) to x86_64 translation involved.
Sometimes I wonder if some people truly grasp the wizardry that emulators are performing. How demanding a game is on the hardware it’s natively running on is almost completely irrelevant, as the emulator has a massive overhead from the fact that, in layman’s terms, it is translating in real time and in software all of the instructions of the machine it is trying to replicate. And the more accurately you are doing this without “cheating” to get the same result as many emulators often do, the more taxing this process is. And obviously, the more powerful the machine being emulated = the more instructions per second the emulator has to “translate” = the more exponentially powerful your machine has to be to “translate” them.
Frankly I’m amazed that we’ve already reached the point that PS4 emulation in a playable state is possible. This must be a very efficiently written emulator and the PS4 must not be a very complicated machine.
great to see, maybe this can be used to play the rdr port
Since it’s a port without any improvements, Xenia can already run the 360 version with minimal issues, i bet it has improvements that the new port doesn’t as the Xenia patches can make the game run at 60+ fps, with no motion blur/DoF and 16x anisotropic filter, this is by far the definitive way to play RDR1
Noted, I will definitely look into that.
Is the same team responsible for RPCS3, so hold your breath, Xenia is a far superior alternative if you wanna play RDR.
Good. Baby steps. Hopefully the emulator is focused on the few exclusives not on PC. Bloodborne most of all. Here’s a comprehensive list
Bloodborne
Drive club
Infamous second son
Killzone shadow fall
Medievil remake
GT7
Last guardian
Shadow of the colossus remake.
Not many games TBH. If Sony slowly ports these games, there would be no need for this emulator.
That’s not how emulation development works. The demanding exclusives that made the most out of the hardware are always the last ones to become fully playable with good performance.
Barely constitutes as a PS4 game really.