Is There a PS5 Emulator for PC? What Actually Exists in 2026

Short answer: yes, but not for serious play yet. PS5 emulators for PC exist today, they are real open-source projects, and they are improving fast. What they cannot do yet is run your PS5 library from start to finish. The games that work best are 2D titles and light remasters, and almost all of those already have an official Steam version.

A year ago this sounded far off. As TechSpot put it on September 29, “just a year ago, it seemed unthinkable that PC users would be able to emulate PlayStation 5 games in any meaningful capacity anytime soon.”

The real projects

There are three serious names. All three publish their code on GitHub under the GPL-2.0 license:

• KytyPS5. Written in C++ for Windows and Linux, with experimental support for Apple Silicon Macs. It is built on a heavily modified version of Kyty, the PS4 and PS5 emulator by InoriRus, which has not changed since 2024. It ships new builds almost daily: two came out on September 30 alone.
• SharpEmu. Written from scratch in C#, for research and with no commercial goals, according to its repository. Its latest version is 0.0.4, from September.
• AnyPS5. It does not emulate the console: it converts PS5 executables into native Windows or Linux programs and swaps Sony’s system libraries for PC versions, an idea similar to Wine or Proton. Its first public release, 0.1.0, came out on September 28.

One point that confuses a lot of people: shadPS4 is a PS4 emulator, not a PS5 one. It is the most advanced emulator for its console, but it does not open PS5 games.

What boots today

Booting is not the same as playing. SharpEmu shows this well in its compatibility list, which goes from “nothing” to “playable” (completable with minor or no issues). As of October 1, it has 61 games tested and marks 10 as playable, all of them 2D or light remasters: Dead Cells, Quake, Quake II, DOOM + DOOM II and both Tomb Raider Remastered collections, among others. Demon’s Souls, Astro Bot and Hades sit one step below: they reach gameplay, but with major issues.

KytyPS5’s community list has about 280 reports, and in 141 of them the game reaches gameplay. That list has no “playable” category. The most eye-catching demos come from there:

• Demon’s Souls went from 1 to 30 fps between September 8 and 13, then to 40-50 fps on a local build that had not been published yet, running on a Core i9-14900K and an RTX 5090, according to DSOGaming. The video showed only two or three areas.
• Astro Bot runs at 30-60 fps through the opening with a community fork, though testing so far covers only the start of the game, according to Wccftech.
• Marvel’s Wolverine, just released on PS5, now launches, but runs “essentially as a slideshow.”

KytyPS5’s official site says it plainly: expect crashes, graphical glitches, low compatibility and poor performance.

What PC you need to try it

KytyPS5’s official requirements are short: Windows 10 (version 1803 or later) or a current Linux distribution, a 64-bit x86 processor, and a Vulkan 1.3 capable GPU with current drivers. SharpEmu asks for a Vulkan GPU and treats Windows as its main platform. If you are not sure which Vulkan version your card supports, the public database at gpuinfo.org lists it by model.

That is what you need for the emulator to open. For a 3D game to actually move, the bar is much higher. The PS5 has an 8-core Zen 2 CPU at up to 3.5 GHz, a 10.3 TFLOPS RDNA 2 GPU and 16 GB of GDDR6, according to Sony’s official spec sheet. The flashiest Demon’s Souls demo used an RTX 5090 and still landed at 40-50 fps. In the compatibility reports for 3D games you see machines like a Ryzen 7 5800X3D with an RTX 4070 Super, or a Ryzen 7 7700X with an RX 7900 XTX.

At the other end, AnyPS5 runs Dreaming Sarah, a 2D game, at a stable 60 fps on a GTX 1050 Ti with a Core i5-7500. That shows its approach is light, not that a modest PC will run big PS5 games.

At canirun we grade your PC against the official requirements of PC games. We do not grade emulators, because no project publishes per-game requirements yet.

The legal part, briefly

Emulation is legal. In the United States, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2000, in Sony v. Connectix, that reverse engineering to build a PlayStation emulator is fair use. What is not legal is piracy: downloading games you did not buy. All three projects say they ship no games and no copyrighted Sony software, and KytyPS5 and SharpEmu ask you to use only legally obtained copies. SharpEmu also removes compatibility reports made with pirated copies.

A practical warning: all three publish their releases on GitHub. If a website asks you to pay, fill out a survey or install something else to “download the PS5 emulator,” it is not one of these projects.

PS5 games you can already play on PC, no emulation needed

If what you want is to play, the safe route is still the official one. Several former PlayStation exclusives are already on Steam, and their recommended specs range from an RTX 2060 to an RTX 3070. Here is how your PC grades against them:

Game	Rec. GPU score	Rec. RAM	Min. RAM	Your PC
Marvel's Spider-Man 2	17,050	16 GB	16 GB	?
God of War Ragnarök	15,500	16 GB	8 GB	?
The Last of Us™ Part II Remastered	17,050	16 GB	16 GB	?
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart	14,300	16 GB	8 GB	?
Returnal™	17,600	16 GB	16 GB	?
Stellar Blade™	15,500	16 GB	16 GB	?
DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH	21,750	16 GB	16 GB	?

That list has stopped growing for story games. On May 18, PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst told staff that Sony’s narrative single-player games will be PlayStation exclusive, confirming earlier Bloomberg reporting. Ghost of Yōtei, Saros and Marvel’s Wolverine stay on PS5, while multiplayer games like Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls will still come to PC. That is a big part of why these emulators get so much attention.

And if what interests you is what already runs well in a PS5 emulator, check Steam first: Dead Cells, DOOM + DOOM II, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered and Hades all have official PC versions and ask for GPUs as modest as a GT 730 or a GTX 650 Ti. To see your grade for any of them, detect your PC or browse the full catalog.

Sources: KytyPS5 on GitHub, KytyPS5 official site, SharpEmu on GitHub, SharpEmu compatibility, SharpEmu FAQ, AnyPS5 on GitHub, Kyty on GitHub, shadPS4 on GitHub, TechSpot, DSOGaming: Demon’s Souls at 40-50 fps, Wccftech: Astro Bot and Wolverine, PlayStation Blog: PS5 specs, Vulkan Hardware Database, Sony v. Connectix, Steam Deck HQ: Sony and single-player games.