A video has been posted on X suggesting that SharpEmu allows Demon’s Souls Remake to run at a smooth 30 FPS, based on frame pacing and runtime data derived from our debug overlay. We chose to view the original footage frame by frame rather than simply repeating what has been stated in the caption and this is what we found out.
30 FPS is legit. It’s simply not the game.
Right at the 1:41 point in the footage, we see the debug overlay registering around 30 FPS for over a minute of time but the console log running in parallel sends us a different message:
bink_ffmpeg active=1 movie=‘attract_movie.bk2’ fps=30/1 … videoout submitted_fps=0.0 presented_fps=30.0 draws=0 draw_ms=0
draws=0. Zero draws. What you can see onscreen at that time — the knight fighting, the demon boss, the “Demon’s Souls” logo — is a pre-rendered Bink video (attract_movie.bk2, then logo_intro_loop.bk2) being decoded and displayed by SharpEmu just like a video player does. The playback of a recorded video file at 30 FPS does not have any relation to PS5 GPU emulation quality — nowadays, any modern GPU can do this without breaking a sweat.
The reason behind what’s going on while the engine is attempting to display
The initial six seconds of the same clip are sufficient to see just what is happening:
FPS 0.2 FLIP 0.3 0.0 MS
GC 41/12/1 TIME 00:00:06
An FPS of 0.2, with the console besieged with messages about agc.wait_suspended, thus confirming that the GPU command processor is stuck once again. Here, SharpEmu is trying to achieve the rendering in the game, which is indeed the only meaningful number in that clip that actually shows some progress (that is, lack of it).
Indeed, our own compatibility tracker is in line with these readings, as illustrated by issue #2, where the most recent actual test was done on July 30, and the game was able to get to the character creation screen with FPS approximately equal to ~2 FPS, with the sound issues and the testing terminated due to the absence of keyboard support.
The importance of this information
We do not want to criticize anybody; pre-rendered intro videos generally play back smoothly and it is easy to mistake that for good living conditions of a game if you do not check your log for draws=0. However, in reality there is a significant difference between an emulator’s video codec doing its job and an emulator’s GPU translation layer doing its job, and only one of those is what “PS5 emulation progress” actually means.
The actual state
The state of Demon’s Souls on SharpEmu today: it boots, it reaches character creation, and it runs at roughly 2 FPS once real rendering starts. That’s genuine, incremental progress just not the headline that’s going around.
If you see performance numbers for SharpEmu anywhere without a way to check the source (a full video, a log file, a link to an actual GitHub issue or PR), it’s worth a second look before taking them at face value. Our compatibility page always reflects live data straight from the tracker.
