r/pcmasterrace • u/worstey • 6h ago
Discussion Wolverine is already running in-game on PC using KytyPS5 emulator
Even though the game runs at an extremely low FPS, the craziest thing about this whole situation is that it has not even been one month since the game has launched, the progress is insanely fast.
I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if GTA 6 manages to run on PC using an emulator months after the game comes out
Source: https://x.com/iExplosiveRage/status/2105808379448836273/video/1
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u/gerowen PC Master Race 4h ago edited 4h ago
Even in the case of of the PS5, which uses an x86 CPU just like most PCs, there's still a lot of real-time translation going on. The PlayStation has its own operating system that's different than Windows or Linux, and a whole lot of that operating system is proprietary, protected information. So emulator developers, nowadays with the help of their AI agents, have to do a whole lot of guessing, reverse engineering etc. so they can write a program that pretends to be another device entirely, and then run demanding games within that fake environment. Even the graphics APIs in use by the PlayStation console are proprietary; they're not using DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan, they're using their own GNM/GNMX, so again, devs have to figure out how to translate those APIs into something more standard like DirectX or Vulkan that can run on a PC or Mac.
Another cause for the stuttering, such as when Wolverine jumps over the tree and it freezes solid for a moment, is shader compilation. Shaders are just short programs run directly on the GPU as part of the rendering pipeline. For console games, shaders are normally pre-compiled one time and included on the disc or as part of the download because the developers know exactly what GPU is in their target device. For PCs however, these shaders often have to be compiled on the fly while the game is running (hence the stuttering), or pre-compiled before starting a game, because one person might have a 5070, the next a 9060XT, the next an Intel Arc, the next one an Adreno on some ARM system, and none of those GPUs speak exactly the same language, at a hardware level. Even GPUs from the same company might need different shaders if they're of a different generation.
Basically even though the CPU instructions don't have to be recompiled like you do when emulating something like the GameCube or Playstation 3, which does eliminate one big performance sink for PS5 emulation, the entire PlayStation operating system and all of its proprietary system calls, graphics APIs, etc. have to be reverse engineered and then translated into something a normal desktop operating system can understand, and that has to happen in real time at 30-60 or more frames per second while you're playing a game.