What is the PS5X emulator for Xbox Series X and how does it work? Alex Van Aken/Shutterstock In a YouTube video posted on September 8, developer Devran Cosmo Uenal booted up the PlayStation 5 version of Quake II on an Xbox Series X and played it with an Xbox controller. But the game was running through PS5X, Uenal’s Xbox port of the open-source PS5 emulator KytyPS5, and got three more PS5 games working alongside it. The fact that you managed to run PS5 games on an Xbox is great, but there’s one problem: PS5X only works in the console’s official developer mode, where Microsoft’s documentation limits games to 5GB of memory. Unfortunately, that rules out most current-gen games, and there’s still no public download for anyone else to try out. How the PS5X works Sony and Microsoft built their current consoles around very similar AMD hardware. Both have eight Zen 2 CPU cores, RDNA 2 graphics, and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, and PS5 games are compiled for the same x86-64 processor architecture that PCs use. That means the KytyPS5 emulator can run its code on the host CPU instead of recreating the PS5 hardware in software. Its developer calls it a compatibility layer and, practically, it behaves more like a translator, converting what a PS5 game asks for into something that a PC can understand. KytyPS5 translates the PS5’s graphics commands and recompiles its shaders for Vulkan. As a result, you need a Vulkan 1.3 graphics card on the PC, but the Xbox Developer Mode only supports DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. “Since Vulkan is not supported, everything must be translated to DirectX,” Uenal wrote in the description of the YouTube video, where he also admitted that AI was involved in the work. As VideoCardz pointed out, that means the fixes the KytyPS5 team makes to its PC renderer need to be adapted before PS5X can use them. Uenal’s video also describes the PS5X as a “research project” to “run PS5 game and homebrew backups” on a Series X in developer mode. It claims that it does not include any PS5 firmware or decryption keys, and KytyPS5’s documentation instructs users to stick to game files they have obtained legally. Circumventing copy protection is ultimately what killed the Switch emulator Yuzu, whose creators settled a lawsuit from Nintendo in 2024 by paying $2.4 million and shutting down the project. The team behind PS3 emulator RPCS3 lists KytyPS5 and SharpEmu as the two active open source PS5 emulators that can launch games and warns players about scam sites posing as real sites. What the PS5X can run Thamyris Salgueiro/Shutterstock At the time of writing, the PS5X runs the PS5 versions of GEX Trilogy, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and Quake II, and all four are compatible with Xbox controller inputs. Some of them have functional sound, and TweakTown estimates that Quake II runs at approximately 25 to 45 frames per second in the Uenal footage. It’s worth noting that these four games are also sold on other platforms, so there’s no sign yet of PS5X running a PS5 exclusive, and Uenal admits it’s still early and compatibility is limited. Android Authority reported on September 28 that KytyPS5 is now included in the game on a variety of PS5 titles on PC, and that a user had shown Marvel’s Wolverine arriving at its main menu, in slow motion, on a machine with an NVIDIA RTX 5090. However, that clip did not show any gameplay and it is unclear if he used the standard version of the emulator. PS5 emulation on PC becomes more viable every week, but it’s still an extremely nascent field, and PS5X only inherits the progress once each fix has been rebuilt for DirectX and reduced to a much smaller memory budget. Developer Mode Memory Limit Microsoft limits games in developer mode to a relatively small 5 GB of memory and applications to 1 GB. Requests for more memory than that allocation fail. By contrast, a Series X retail game gets 13.5GB of the console’s 16GB, while the rest is reserved for the console’s operating system. That leaves the PS5X running on about 37 percent of the memory a regular Xbox game can use, making it an obvious choice for big current-gen releases. Microsoft only lifts this limit when the software is run through the Visual Studio debugger, which is a setting designed for developers to test their code. Microsoft completely blocked emulators from normal Xbox retail in 2023, as the reason for doing so was a store policy that prohibits products that emulate a gaming system. He then began enforcing sanctions, reportedly handing out 15-day suspensions to players who found a solution. Since then, gamers who want to play PS2 or GameCube games through, for example, Dolphin, the most popular GameCube emulator, have had to rely on Developer Mode. But a console in that mode cannot load retail games until it is switched back. Xbox Series X comes with the same Zen 2 architecture and RDNA 2 graphics as a PS5. It also has the same amount of memory and the PS5X can use less than a third of that amount. But none of this really matters because of the memory limit. There’s no real fix for this without a jailbreak, meaning Xbox players won’t benefit from the progress made on PC. Sure, the PS5X is interesting, but it will still be an interesting little curiosity rather than anything major gamers can use. If you are interested in trying PS5X and similar emulation projects, you should be careful. Scammers are taking advantage of the interest these projects are receiving, such as releasing malware with similar names like PCS5X to try to trick players into downloading it.
