Something happened this month that was not supposed to happen for years. A PlayStation 5 emulator loaded up the PlayStation 5 version of Grand Theft Auto V on a Windows PC, got past the boot process, and reached the game's menus and settings. Michael De Santa appeared on the screen, and the player could open the options. This might not sound like much for a game that originally came out in 2013, but it's a genuine milestone and the story of why it is happening right now is more interesting than the technical feat itself.
You see, an emulator is a piece of software that tricks a game built for one machine into running on a completely different one. In this case, it lets a Windows PC pretend to be a PlayStation 5, so that games written only for Sony's flagship console an run on hardware Sony never designed them for. It is enormously difficult, because you are essentially rebuilding a console's entire behaviour in software, and it usually takes many years to get anywhere useful.
Except, it took KytyPS5, the emulator making headlines, revived by a developer who goes by Nmzik, much less time than emulators normally would.
What the PS5 Emulator Can Actually Do Right Now
| Achievement | Reality |
|---|---|
Grand Theft Auto V on PlayStation 5 | Boots to menus and settings only, not playable |
Quake II Remastered | Reaches actual gameplay, but at around 7 frames per second with glitches |
Playable commercial games | A handful of smaller titles, barely |
Campaign or online play | Completely inaccessible |
GPU support | Mostly tested on Nvidia, patchy on AMD and Intel |
The real state of KytyPS5 and the wider PlayStation 5 emulation scene as of today, July 16.
Sure, getting GTA V to reach the menu isn't the same as driving through Los Santos. The campaign remains inaccessible. You still can't play Grand Theft Auto Online either. What the emulator has proven is that it can process the opening chunk of a modern PlayStation 5 game's code, its libraries, its video output, its menus. Admittedly, as the emulator's developers will tell you, this is a bit of a party trick. Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced already exists. Emulating a PS5 game on a PC when a native PC version exists isn't necessary.
Why it's making rounds on the internet is because it's a sign of where the technology is going. For years, PlayStation 5 emulation was basically dead. Projects would start, stall, and get abandoned. Nobody was in a hurry. Then two things happened at almost exactly the same time, and the whole scene exploded overnight.
First, Sony's decision to kill physical discs lit a fire under the preservation community, the people who worry that when a company controls every copy of a game, those games can simply vanish. Second, Grand Theft Auto VI launching on consoles only, with no PC version in sight, gave PC players a very specific, very motivating reason to want PS5 emulation to work. Suddenly there was demand, and demand brings developers. Multiple projects, KytyPS5, SharpEmu, and the RPCSX research effort tied to the experienced RPCS3 team, are all now racing at once.
By tightening its grip on how people access its games, the direct result is a community working harder than ever to access them another way.
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At this rate, GTA V could be genuinely playable on these emulators as soon as next month. However, the ideal target here is the next Grand Theft Auto, and that's a completely different conversation entirely.
For perspective, the best PlayStation 4 emulator, after roughly a decade of development, can only properly run around a fraction of that console's library. The PlayStation 5 is newer and more complex. Getting a brand-new, cutting-edge, technically monstrous game like GTA VI running smoothly on an emulator is the kind of thing that realistically takes years. However, one thing that PS5 emulation has on its side is that never before has consoles had similar hardware architecture with desktops and laptops. So while it's more powerful and complicated, it's also more familiar, in a sense.
Sure, the official PC version of GTA 6 will likely come out long before any emulator can run it, but emulator development may catch up fast enough. When that happens, the better question becomes, not if GTA 6 can run on PC, but if the official, polished, and properly funded PC port can beat something that what a bunch of individuals worked together on.
For now though, if you're on PC, waiting for GTA 6 emulation isn't the best option. The real version is coming. It will run infinitely better than anything hacked together unless something drastic happens, especially since KytyPS5 is no longer available on GitHub as of the moment of writing. Whether Take-Two's lawyers or Sony's got to them is something we can't answer just yet.
In the meantime, you can play GTA V and GTA Online on PC at a discount via GTA+ where you can enjoy the latest update.