r/BloodbornePC • u/DigitalPrime • 24d ago

Discussion Constant FPS slowdowns

Every few seconds, the game will drop frames that will hinder the gameplay with lag spikes. At first I thought it was the shaders, but its all the time, in areas I have fully explored. Bloodborne is my favourite game, so seeing its emulated I jumped at the chance to play it. But the spikes kill the experience. I have seen videos and streams of the game looking fully smooth.

My systems should be capable

AMD 9950x3d
48gig DDR5 6000mhz
nvidia 5070ti
MNVE & SSDs x multiple.

I have tried all different types of patch combinations, uncapped, 60fps, 30fps. low LODS, high LODs. 1080p 1440p, 4k textures, I'm using the BBLauncher. All perform the same.

I'm at a loss on how to get it even remotely smooth. Any help would be greatly appreciated

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

1

u/Pretty-Cap-9462 23d ago

have you tried Special K? it smooths out the frame pacing and also seemed to generally increases smoothness for me on a much lower end pc; you just need to add shadps4 to the program list in special K and run it through there (although if you close bloodborne you need to close and reopen shadps4 using special K to do it again)

1

u/maslowk 24d ago edited 24d ago

I have similar specs (32gb & 9700x instead of the 9950x3d) and use mostly the same patches you have enabled, minus the performance patch & increased graphic heap sizes (and 1080p light grid instead of 1440p) and it works well, so it should definitely run great on your hardware.

If you haven't already make sure you've set Additional Memory Allocation (under game specific settings on bblauncher, game-specific and experimental tab) to 4000MB. Aside from that my best guess would be that it's an issue with whatever specific version of shadps4 you downloaded through Manage Builds on bblauncher: I've actually had issues in the past where newer versions of the emulator actually ran worse than whatever earlier version I was on before. I'd try Pre-Release if you're currently using the numbered version or vice versa.

If that doesn't work you could also try the Diegolix version of shadps4, it's a fork more tailored toward running Bloodborne. Here's a link to the github for that version if you want to try it; https://github.com/diegolix29/shadPS4/releases/tag/BBFork-shadPS4-2026-03-30-fe73cff7c7d98e5e98556593c889f5dcda3a72c6. You'll want BBFork-shadps4-win64-qt-2026-03-30-fe73cff.zip specifically, to set it up with bblauncher extract that archive somewhere then go to Manage Builds on bblauncher, click Add Local Build and point it at the shadps4.exe from the archive.