The slow beginning of a new era

PlayStation 5 emulation has reached the Steam Deck, although calling the current result playable would be generous. Astro’s Playroom has been booted directly on Valve’s handheld using the experimental SharpEmu emulator. It’s not even a full game yet as emulator teams are still working on that.

The demonstration comes from user Ihc160 and was shared by BrutalSam, who regularly shares SharpEmu progress. The video shows the game running locally under SteamOS rather than through Remote Play or cloud streaming. Performance sits between roughly 0.5 and 1 FPS.

But it boots

Astro’s Playroom does not reach gameplay in the demonstration. SharpEmu gets far enough to display the PlayStation Studios sequence and loading screen, so this is currently more of a compatibility test than an indication that PS5 games are becoming playable on Steam Deck.

SharpEmu is written from scratch in C# and supports Windows, Linux and macOS. The developers say the project is still focused on accuracy and emulator infrastructure rather than optimizing individual games. Linux output uses Vulkan, which allows the emulator to run natively on the x86 Steam Deck.

PS5 emulation on PCs is progressing fast, but keep expectations in check

We have been following SharpEmu since its early PS5 compatibility tests last month. The project has already booted titles such as Astro Bot on PC, while competing PS5 emulator KytyPS5 has progressed further with some 3D games. SharpEmu became a community-driven open-source project in July.

Steam Deck combines four Zen 2 CPU cores with an 8-CU RDNA 2 GPU, while PlayStation 5 has eight Zen 2 cores and 36 RDNA 2 Compute Units. It’s unlikely that Deck would ever reach the same performance, but let’s not forget the handheld has lower resolution and custom drivers that can enable frame-gen technology which PS5 does not have. So maybe, one day?

Sources: NotebookCheck

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