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 enhancements. His tests 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.

For optimal visual fidelity, Morgan strongly suggests installing the Vertex Explosion Fix mod. While this mod disables pre-game character face customization, it effectively eliminates distracting visual artifacts like stretched or misplaced polygons. No other mods are necessary; ShadPS4's built-in menu provides extensive options, including 60fps support, resolutions up to 4K, and chromatic aberration toggles.

While occasional stutters were present, Morgan found Bloodborne generally maintained a smooth 60fps experience at 1080p. Experiments with 1440p and 1800p yielded sharper visuals, but at the cost of significant performance drops and frequent crashes. Therefore, he recommends sticking to 1080p (matching the PS4) or 1152p for the best balance of performance and visual quality.

Morgan concluded that the very existence of playable PS4 emulation for Bloodborne via ShadPS4 is a remarkable feat. While acknowledging some remaining technical hurdles, he highlighted the emulator's impressive capability to run Bloodborne with a largely positive experience.