PS5 Emulation becoming viable on lower end PCs!

[u/agente4242]

Using Jetsku's KytyPS5 Fork as it has some fixes in both Astro games.

Build is an RTX 5060 + Ryzen 5 5600GT (Same performance as a 5500, 6c/12t), 16GB RAM. Game is Astro's Playroom.

It's still getting around 35 fps in the main lobby, but inside the actual levels its hovering around 45-60fps! Not sure I'd call it fully playable yet, but the progress is amazing.

More gameplay and settings used, guide (english subtitled): https://youtu.be/yMw7_cGbicw

Edit: fixed link. Meant lower end when compared to most showcases of these emulators being 5090s, X3D chips and DDR5... Better wording would be "current-generation lower end".

Also, people seem to be wildly overestimating the 5600gt. Genuinely can't run any triple-A RPCS3 game at a locked 30fps.

[u/Cookies3000]

I find these posts a bit misleading. Ive tried the emulator with Astro Bot too, with that certain fork of the emu and even the non RT fixes.

What nobody talks about in these posts is that shader compilation is a huge problem.

The game basically freezes, it drops to 0-5fps because the GPU has to wait for the CPU. And thats every time a new asset/animation or any other visual effect in general gets loaded. Its not a very playable experience.

Once I played thru a level before and I play it again its nice and smooth 60fps because its cached. You basically have to play thru the whole game once to have a decent experience the second time.

[u/PeachMan- → u/Cookies3000]

Shader compilation is always a big hurdle for new emulators. Go look up old threads about CEMU alpha builds with shader compilation issues. I used to have to do the same thing; load a level a few times before it ran smoothly. But it's not an issue anymore.

This emulator is not ready for prime time yet, but that's fine. This progress is very encouraging.

[u/Cookies3000 → u/PeachMan-]

I agree im not trying to be the boo man. I just disagree with the statement of "running smooth 60fps". Its not a smooth 60fps experience.

I apprecaite the work people put into these emulators and the progress is crazy indeed.

If someone told me there will be a ps5 emulator in a promising stage lietrally before gta6 a year ago i wouldnt have belived it.

[u/sdcar1985 → u/Cookies3000]

Lol, "the boo man." Never heard it described that way, but I like it

[u/PlayfulSurprise5237 → u/PeachMan-]

I was having to do this with CEMU for BOTW and TOTK.

We'd just go download shader packs from people with similar GPUs.

One person plays the game inside and out, and paves the way for others.

But even then it was still kind of janky because I think driver versions have a role to play, and I was on Nvidia which updates constantly.

[u/PeachMan- → u/PlayfulSurprise5237]

Last time I tried playing TOTK it just sat for a several minutes and compiled shaders when I first launched the game. I didn't have to go find somebody's cache with a similar GPU, it just did it. But I have an AMD card, running Vulkan.

[u/DarkFantom → u/Cookies3000]

Couldn't this just be resolved by forcing shaders to pre compile on game launch?

[u/VickZilla → u/DarkFantom]

The way games are programmed now they don’t really announce that kind of stuff ahead of time. It takes a lot of effort to find out the shaders you need in advance

[u/Virtual_Bar7818 → u/VickZilla]

Is this what Sony made a whole big deal about with their storage speeds?

[u/VickZilla → u/Virtual_Bar7818]

That’s part of it yeah! But the biggest different that those speeds make would be for much larger assets like textures and models that are live streamed into the game to minimize loading screens

Shaders are very small but they require CPU cycles to get compiled which is where the stutter comes from

[u/robhaswell → u/VickZilla]

You're talking in the context of a project that has just reversed engineered the entire PS5 operating system. Fixing shader compilation sounds on the easier end of possible.

[u/VickZilla → u/robhaswell]

scskiller is trying to solve it and you can see how weird their methods are

[u/f-stop8 → u/VickZilla]

Wouldn't then all it take is for one person to cache all the shaders and then compile that data for everyone else to pre render?

[u/VickZilla → u/f-stop8]

Sadly this wouldn’t work with just one person on PC due to all of the differences in hardware.

Instead we need a shader cache built for each GPU architecture and even then I think there are minor differences that don’t make it 100% compiled for each card in that architecture anyways.

Since every console is the same they are able to include them and skip this step

[u/Deep-Pie-4602 → u/VickZilla]

We could just have someone play through the game, track the shaders that need compiling, emit the spirv or actual shadercode used, and have other users precompile those shaders

[u/Cookies3000 → u/DarkFantom]

Not sure but prolly yes. I think rpcs3 does that for ps3 emulation.

[u/I_think_Im_hollow → u/Cookies3000]

Lol. Flashbacks of CEMU and Breath of The Wild. Maybe there's a way to export and upload the shader cache for other to use? Or maybe we just need to wait until performance gets good enough that it doesn't matter.

[u/Gooftus → u/I_think_Im_hollow]

Back in the day, I downloaded somebody's pre-cached shaders for BOTW and it work flawlessly. Eliminated 99% of the stutters. Not sure how well that would work for a larger and higher fidelity game like GTA though

[u/RemoteButtonEater → u/Gooftus]

...I didn't know this was an option and just gave up, lol

[u/Cookies3000 → u/I_think_Im_hollow]

Yea im sure there is gonna be a solution to this at somepoint

[u/Sarspazzard → u/I_think_Im_hollow]

Those were the days haha

[u/thisinfinitebath → u/Cookies3000]

Sometimes you have to walk before you can run.

[u/Cookies3000 → u/thisinfinitebath]

Yea sure and dont get me wrong, these emulators are great and i appreciate the work people do, even with the help of AI.

Im just saying that before i tested it myself i thought the game would just run on 60fps like that because of all these posts but thats not the case.

These posts make it seem like its more or less plug and play. Just a little misleading.Great progress tho for sure!

[u/QuantumBit127 → u/Cookies3000]

I solved this with a couple techniques… precompiling the shaders and saving them to disk, driver pipeline caching and saving translated shaders to disk.

This improved performance greatly for me, loading times drastically reduced and much less hitching during gameplay, especially new areas. Made demons souls go from basically unplayable on my hw to playable at close to 60 fps in most places( 12900k , 3080ti and 64 gb ram)

[u/Disastrous-Ad-1999 → u/Cookies3000]

Might be interesting for the scskiller dev to tackle.

[u/Cookies3000 → u/Disastrous-Ad-1999]

Definitely, i was thinking the same! It wont work for now because scskiller depends on DX11 and DX12 but maybe there is a way.

[u/williamlgdr → u/Cookies3000]

Astro Bot and Astro Playroom are different games you know...

[u/TooHungryForFood → u/Cookies3000]

Always has been. I remember being so excited in 2014 about a Dreamcast emulator on Android only to spent the next 5 days downloading games it either not working, crashing or playing a level and it won't load again. Messing with the settings eventually being disappointed and giving up. 

[u/No-Round8184 → u/Cookies3000]

So you tried the emulator but not the program that just converts PS5 games into windows or Linux executables?

[u/noopdles → u/Cookies3000]

a couple thousand commits co-authored by claude code over the span of two days and it will be sorted out

[u/Cookies3000 → u/noopdles]

prolly yea

[u/icy1007 → u/noopdles]

Not really.

[u/DesignerEagle4080 → u/Cookies3000]

give it a day

[u/AbbreviationsAny9759 → u/Cookies3000]

I haven't given it a go, but regardless, that really doesn't seem that much of a big deal compared to what they've actually been able to accomplish so far.

I mean, I don't think you're bashing it and just giving a bit of awareness, which is great nonetheless. But I just want to remind others that this is still a work in progress, and the shader issue seems like a smaller issue in comparison to the things they've achieved with this project.

[u/mrloko120 → u/Cookies3000]

Don't you dare speak of what's beyong the cherry picked clips. Thats illegal.