An experimental PlayStation 5 emulator is now bringing selected PS5 games to jailbroken PlayStation 4 consoles, with developer Chokri Hammedi, also known as blue0x1, demonstrating promising results using a project called EmuFive. The emulator has reportedly managed to run God of War: Sons of Sparta at approximately 40 FPS or higher on a PS4 Pro, despite the considerable hardware gap between the two console generations.
EmuFive is built around KytyPS5, an experimental PS5 emulator that has recently demonstrated progress running several PlayStation exclusives on PC, including Marvel’s Wolverine. However, the project takes a different approach to running games on PS4 hardware. Instead of operating through the console’s standard operating system, EmuFive uses a lightweight Linux environment installed through PS4 Multiboot and launched using a GoldHEN payload.
The developer has also demonstrated that the PS5 version of Hollow Knight: Silksong can boot through the emulator. However, the game already has a native PS4 release, and both currently demonstrated titles are 2D games. Hammedi notes that several other games still suffer from poor performance, meaning compatibility with more demanding PS5 releases remains limited.
One of the biggest technical challenges comes from the difference between the processors used in the two consoles. KytyPS5 passes the game’s x86-64 instructions directly to the host CPU rather than fully emulating the PS5 processor. While the PS5 uses AMD Zen 2 architecture, the PS4 relies on older Jaguar CPU cores that lack instruction-set extensions such as AVX2, FMA, and BMI2.
To address this limitation, Hammedi developed a patch that translates unsupported instructions into older SSE4.2, AVX, and BMI1 equivalents, mostly during game loading. This allows some PS5 software to execute on the PS4, although the additional translation introduces processing overhead on an already slower CPU.
EmuFive also supports loading game files from USB storage, the PS4’s internal drive, and shared folders on a PC. Users must provide their own game dumps, as the project does not distribute game files.
Anyone interested in testing the emulator should download it exclusively from the official blue0x1 GitHub repository. This warning is important because fake KytyPS5 and AnyPS5 repositories were recently reported to distribute malware.
Although EmuFive cannot currently deliver playable performance in demanding 3D PS5 games, reaching around 40 FPS in God of War: Sons of Sparta on a PS4 Pro shows that experimental PlayStation emulation is making progress beyond PC hardware.
