PS5 emulator SharpEmu ships 0.0.5 "nexus" builds with Gran Turismo 7 fixes and render scaling

Two SharpEmu builds on 3 and 8 October brought fixes for Gran Turismo 7, GTA 5 and Astro's Playroom. Its compatibility list now counts 38 playable PS5 titles out of 92 tested.

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SharpEmu, the PlayStation 5 emulator written from scratch in C#, has put out two builds in its 0.0.5 "nexus" series this month. v0.0.5-nexus arrived on 3 October and v0.0.5-nexus-release.2 followed on 8 October, each for Windows, Linux and macOS. They are the project's first releases since v0.0.4-release.2 on 25 September.

What changed

The 3 October build lists fixes under named games: "Gran Turismo 7 Fixes", a performance change for Astro Bot and Demon's Souls, shader fixes for Demon's Souls, Little Nightmares, Little Nightmares III and Astro Bot, a fix to shader resource handling marked for GTA 5, and directory handling for Quake II. It also adds HDR output support and pre-reserves the guest address space on Linux and macOS hosts.

The 8 October build is mostly about the graphics path. It adds internal render resolution scaling, compiles shader resource plans in the background, reports mip statistics so streamed textures reach full detail, and carries shaders for Astro's Playroom and two batches of Unity engine fixes. A long run of changes cuts per-draw overhead and lock contention, and a macOS fix addresses a Rosetta hang and a buffer deadlock. One line shows how unsettled things still are: the build reverts "the 18 Silent Hill rendering and performance merges".

Where it stands

The project's website keeps a compatibility list built from user reports, each tied to an exact build. On 11 October it read "92 of 9,176 tracked titles tested", with 55 reaching gameplay: 38 rated playable, 17 in-game with major issues, 5 reaching menus, 19 that only boot and 13 that do nothing. The most recent playable reports include The Rogue Prince of Persia, Blue Prince and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R. Playable on that list means completable with minor or no issues; it does not promise full speed, and the screenshots on the GitHub page include Astro Bot at 13.5 FPS on an RTX 4070 Super.

The README still calls SharpEmu experimental, says the current focus is "accuracy and infrastructure setup rather than game-specific compatibility", and leaves PS4 games to shadPS4. It needs a Vulkan-capable GPU, or MoltenVK on macOS, and a game's eboot.bin from the user's own dump. The developers say all games used in testing are dumped from consoles they own. A note added to the README during this cycle says only sharpemu.app and the links in the repository are official, and that any other websites, accounts or donation pages are unauthorised.

Sources

Image: SharpEmu

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