Emulators are indispensable pieces to preserve the history of video games. We currently take it for granted that we can play NES and SNES games on any support, since it is very difficult to do so with those consoles. In the future the same will happen with PS4, and therefore it is very positive that the first PC emulator was able to run the first game.
While RPCS3 continues to advance by leaps and bounds and already allows more than 1,500 games to run stably, some people are already developing emulators to be able to play PS4 games on PC. The two that are currently more advanced are Orbital and GPCS4 , and the latter has become the first to run a commercial console game on PC.
We Are Doomed: the first PS4 game run on PC
The game in particular is We Are Doomed . This game is available on PS4, Xbox One, PS Vita and PC , and consumes very few resources. However, the fact that it has been able to run for the first time in the PS4 emulator is a new historical milestone that opens the door to run many other PlayStation 4 games on PC .
The game, despite not consuming many resources, runs very slowly (just 2 or 3 FPS), so it is far from being playable. This is because the emulator recompiles and reloads all textures and buffers with each frame, making it very inefficient. They also have problems with the emulation of the console control, but they affirm that little by little they will be working to polish these failures because the emulator is currently very green. At the moment, they are also working on being able to execute NieR, which at least have managed to show the logos of the beginning of the beginning.
Despite this breakthrough, it is likely that it will take several years to run AAA games with an acceptable frame rate. There is nothing more to see the complex development that RPCS3 has had since its creation, where it began to develop in 2011 and did not run its first commercial game until 2014
However, with PS4 the emulation should be simpler because the architecture used by the console (x86-64) is the same as conventional computers use, although with the PS3 Cell chip there was more documentation.
GPCS4 is open source and is being developed as “fun and technical research”. You can take a look at their code on their GitHub page , where the latest version of December allowed to run 2D images already. To run it it is necessary to have a processor that supports AVX512 instructions , in addition to a graphics card that supports Vulkan since the emulator is based on this API. In addition, at the moment they only offer support for Windows which is where the development is taking place.
