AI-rewritten: This is a summary of an article from Tom’s Hardware, rewritten by AI (Qwen, running locally) to make it easier to read. The facts come from the original article – read it for the full story.

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A popular Xbox emulator named Xemu has been ported to jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles by Reddit user u/Yzenxam. The new version, called XPSemu, runs on the modder’s GitHub page at ZiZc3. According to the creator, XPSemu is functionally identical to Xemu; the only change was enabling it to run as an application on the PS5. To achieve this, the project utilizes QEMU’s TCG JIT technology to translate the Xbox CPU in real time and connects to the PS5’s AMD GPU via the open-source RADV Vulkan driver.

ZiZc3 added several features to the port, including a controller-friendly dashboard, per-game settings, cover art, play time tracking, game patches, a performance overlay, logs, and specific CPU optimizations for the PS5’s Zen 2 processor. However, the modder noted that the emulated Xbox CPU remains the bottleneck, operating at 85-97% capacity while the GPU stays mostly idle. Consequently, resolution multipliers up to four times do not significantly improve performance, and FSR upscaling adds no speed benefit.

Performance varies by game. For example, Halo 2 runs at 30 FPS in menus but reaches 51-60 FPS with a specific patch during the opening sequence, though gameplay drops to 36-50 FPS. Forza Motorsport caps at 30 FPS in many areas but struggles to 10-20 FPS in heavy sections. While there are fewer than 15 fully PS5-exclusive games currently available, other emulation projects for Xbox 360 and PS5 Proton have been announced by users BrinoTk and Mihawk9_9. The PS5 already supports emulators for older PlayStation systems and the Nintendo Switch, Wii U, and 3DS through RetroArch.