// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
Modder brings original Xbox emulation to jailbroken PS5
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Popular Xbox emulator Xemu has just been ported to jailbroken Sony PlayStation 5 consoles. Reddit user u/Yzenxam posted a video of their PS5 running the emulator with three games installed: Forza Motorsport, Halo 2, and Crash Bandicoot. The port, playfully named XPSemu, is on their GitHub page: ZiZc3.
The modder has stated that XPSemu is Xemu and is nothing different; all they did was allow it to be opened on the PS5 as an application. Xemu uses QEMU’s TCG JIT to translate the Xbox CPU to the PS5 CPU in realtime, allowing for fast performance compared to interpretation-based translation.
Xemu has its own translation for the Xbox’ NV2A GPU and uses a Vulkan renderer to work with modern GPUs; thanks to the modder behind PS5_Vulkan, Xemu can talk to the PS5’s AMD GPU through the open-source RADV Vulkan driver — allowing the porter to run Xemu as a native PS5 application.
ZiZc3 also added their own touches as explained in their GitHub repository:"On top of the port, XPSemu adds its own controller-friendly dashboard, per-game settings, cover art, play time, game patches, a performance overlay, a per-game log and a set of CPU optimizations made for the PS5's Zen 2 processor."
While QEMU's TCG JIT is relatively fast, it still leaves plenty to be desired. ZiZc3 explains that the emulated Xbox CPU is the bottleneck, loaded at 85-97% while the PS5 GPU remains mostly idle. As a consequence, the resolution multiplier up to 3-4x barely affects performance, and upscaling with FSR does not add performance.
The developer further explains that the PS5's Zen 2 cores are slower per core than a fast PC, and CPU-heavy games suffer from this. In terms of performance, ZiZc3 has provided a table of their experience and performance of the games on XPSemu:
30 FPS stock. With the Halo 2 60 FPS patch: 51-60 FPS in the opening, 36-50 in gameplay..
30 FPS (its cap) in menus and intro, 15-21 FPS while racing.
22-30 FPS in many areas (30 is its cap), 10-20 FPS in heavy areas.