PS5 homebrew gets a Vulkan driver from Mesa, and RetroArch, Quake II and ScummVM move onto the GPU

A PS5 port of Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver now powers PS5 RetroArch's 1.0 beta, released on 8 October, and on 10 October the payload SDK group packaged it with OpenGL support for other homebrew.

AI-drafted from 4 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Homebrew on a jailbroken PS5 has a Vulkan driver, and over the past week the scene's main projects started using it. The driver is a port of RADV, the open source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics chips that ships in Mesa on Linux, made to run on the console's own GPU by a developer who goes by Mihawk. The PS5_Mesa repository describes it as a fork of Mesa 26.2.0 that adds a "winsys" for the console, the layer that would normally talk to the Linux kernel, and changes RADV "only where the console differs from a Linux GPU".

What the driver does

The README says the driver reports Vulkan 1.4 and that the Khronos conformance test suite now runs on the console in full, although it does not pass everything yet and the known gaps are listed in a separate document. Where the PS5's fixed-function hardware cannot run geometry and tessellation shaders, the port runs them as compute work instead, and it adds mesh and task shaders, ray tracing pipelines and an on-disk shader cache in each title's folder. Output goes through the console's VideoOut, flipping at vblank, and switches to 119.88 Hz when a title asks for it and the display really refreshes at that rate.

Mihawk's own titles moved to it first: a vkQuake port has used RADV since 28 September, and PS5 RetroArch v1.0.0-beta.1, released on 8 October, renders its heavier cores through it. The README for that release lists 33 cores, 18 of them new. Seven are marked as Vulkan on the GPU: Mupen64Plus-Next for Nintendo 64, Dolphin for GameCube and Wii, Azahar for 3DS, Beetle PSX HW, LRPS2 for PlayStation 2, PPSSPP for PSP and Flycast for Dreamcast and NAOMI. The beta also adds a browser-based game library, artwork downloads and DualSense touchpad controls for DS and 3DS touchscreens. The project states that it ships no games, BIOS files, firmware or keys and asks users to dump their own.

OpenGL for everyone else

On 10 October the ps5-payload-dev group, which maintains the payload SDK most PS5 homebrew is built with, packaged Mesa 26.2.0 with 28 PS5 patches in its pacbrew repository. Most of the patches are squashed from Mihawk's fork. The rest bring OpenGL through Zink, Mesa's OpenGL layer that runs on top of Vulkan, plus EGL on the console's display output, so programs written for OpenGL can use the GPU too. The commit adding it is titled "mesa: add AI slop implementation of vulkan and opengl", and the follow-up that switches SDL2 over carries the note "TODO: this is AI slop, so a human needs to review this".

The group's websrv v0.35 homebrew bundle, tagged the same day, already uses it. Commits in the release move Yamagi Quake II from its software renderer to the OpenGL 3 renderer with the message "render on gpu at 4k", and switch ScummVM, EDuke32, Mari0 and Omnispeak to OpenGL rendering. Transmission and TVHeadend were dropped from the bundle as unsupported.

All of this needs a console already jailbroken with a kernel exploit, and the work is new: the RetroArch release is labelled a beta, and the people packaging Mesa say plainly that the code has not had a human review yet.

Sources

Image: Mihawk / PS5_RetroArch

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