You’ll need a powerful PC and a copy of the original game, but thanks to a new patch to the PS3 emulator RPCS3, it’s now possible to play the 2009 action-role-playing game Demon’s Souls in 4K while running at 60 frames per second.
This has been a dream for Demon’s Souls fans for several years now, going back to when homebrew developers were first able to get the game running PC back in 2017.
Last year, improvements to the emulator made Demon’s Souls playable at a consistent 30fps, the same as it runs on PS3. Now, thanks to the work of RPCS3 programmer Whatcookie, there’s a new patch for the emulator that makes it possible to unlock Demon’s Souls’ framerate without messing up the rest of the game.
You can see the results, which look crisp, incredibly responsive, and silky smooth, in a video Whatcookie shared on Youtube:
“I assumed that a framerate patch for Demon’s Souls must be impossibly difficult since the only 60FPS patch that was made broke the gamespeed and caused everything to run twice as fast,” Whatcookie wrote in a blog post announcing the patch on Tuesday.
What they found instead was that advances in processing speeds over the last couple of years have made it possible for a PC to keep up without crashing. Whatcookie’s patch simply reduces the amount of time that advances in the game with each frame by half, so that things look and feel normal rather than moving twice as fast.
“With the patch enabled at 60FPS, I’m able to get a locked 60FPS 95 per cent of the time on my i7 7700K,” they wrote. “If you have a Ryzen 3000 or i7 8000 series desktop CPU then you can reach 60FPS 99% of the time. Of course as the emulator continues to improve further, the system requirements will continue to drop lower and lower.”
It’s a fitting new milestone for a game that will be celebrating its tenth anniversary this fall. Sadly, despite a cult following, Demon’s Souls remains a PS3-exclusive. It hasn’t been ported to PC, where all of the other Souls games are available, or remastered for the PS4, a decision series director Hidetaka Miyazaki said would ultimately be up to Sony.
At least for players with a good PC, that wait is finally over.
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