This amazing PS4 racing game is finally playable on PC

We do have a rule of never saying never in the emulation world, but the last few console generations have definitely been trickier to emulate on PC. Up until the PlayStation 2, things were pretty smooth, and emulating those games is possible even on modern mobile phones. I myself have a habit of being "that guy" on any flight I take who's running Silent Hill or Resident Evil 4 through Retroarch. However, things do get trickier after that console generation, thanks to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360's specialized architecture.

Of course, it goes without saying that emulating PlayStation 4 games on PC has been a very uphill battle, and the journey is far from over. Spine may have failed, but fpPS4 did make some headway when it came to emulation. Over time, however, the go-to emulator for PS4 games on PC became ShadPS4, which has made some significant strides lately. The last few months for ShadPS4 have been filled with steady progress and major updates. The PlayStation-exclusive BloodBorne becoming fully playable was a huge milestone for all PC players who waited years to play the game. Now, my favorite racing game of all time, Driveclub, is closer than ever to being fully playable on PC.

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Bloodborne being fully playable was the first major milestone

We'll never know why Sony never gave us a PS5 port

As someone who played Elden Ring and then proceeded to fall in love with the Soulsborne genre, I wanted nothing more than to play Bloodborne after being done with the Dark Souls trilogy. That meant either playing it on a PlayStation 5 — which I didn't own yet — or watching three different full playthroughs over the course of a month. Of course, I did the latter.

Over the last twelve months, efforts to make this fantastic 2015 game playable on PC hit full speed, and while the initial path was rocky with black screens, menu freezes, and the game refusing to move past the main menu, nobody involved ever lost hope. Just a little under half-a-year ago, Bloodborne became fully playable from start to finish on PC with ShadPS4.

In fact, the game now runs on PC with enhancements that PlayStation users never got in the first place, including a 60fps mode, QoL improvements, and significant visual upgrades. In a nutshell, PC got the Bloodborne remaster the rest of the world never got. Right before the game became fully playable on PC via ShadPS4, there was a brief period when each breakthrough ignited renewed fervor in the community.

Redditors stayed up sleepless nights to take one more step in the emulation process — somebody managed to get past the initial crashes, while someone else piggybacked off that knowledge to discover the next obstacle. The community was truly working together to realize this long-dreamt PC-emulated remaster, and it was genuinely a time of sheer excitement.

That's the time period we're in right now when it comes to making Driveclub fully playable on PC — significant strides have been made, and it's only a matter of time now.

Driveclub is so close to being fully playable on PC

I could argue for hours about why it's the best racer of all time

The past couple of weeks have been important for anyone who's wanted to play Driveclub on PC. Sure, I can always pop in my disc and play the game on my PlayStation 5, but that won't give me a single frame above 30 fps unless I were to jailbreak the console, which I'm quite happy not going until the next PlayStation comes out, thank you very much.

With the latest ShadPS4 update v0.10.0, Driveclub is almost playable for everyone — 'almost' being the operative word here. The 2014 game is now over a decade old, yet it still offers some of the best sound design, weather effects, and sense of speed in any racing title. Anyone who's ever had a conversation with me about racing games has had to listen for hours on end about this game, and that's not changing anytime soon.

In the latest update of ShadPS4, Driveclub's 1.28 version has been running rather smoothly with a 60fps patch thrown in for good measure. I do have my reservations about the 60fps experience, because it removes the game's motion blur, thus messing with the sense of speed, but there's no denying just how smooth it looks.

Still, seeing it run at nearly a stable 60fps on AMD Ryzen X3D chips has been a wonderful experience just by watching alone — emulation has always been a CPU-heavy task, and many users with 6-core processors like the Ryzen 5 5600X or even the Ryzen 5 7600X have complained about stutters and frame drops. Right now, at least, Driveclub's smoother 60fps experience is reserved only for those with the biggest, baddest CPUs. Still, it's only a matter of time before optimizations are made.

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There are still a ton of improvements to be made

While playable, Driveclub on PC isn't nearly as enjoyable... yet

Sure, the game is up and running, and for a few users who've been working tirelessly, Driveclub has been running on ShadPS4 smoothly enough. However, that's where the problems start. To begin with, the menu screens are still stuck at a handful of FPS, sometimes dropping to 1-2fps because daytime races are a problem at the moment. Any time the game renders something while the sun is shining, framerates drop well below unplayable levels.

On ShadPS4 v0.9.0, the grass in Driveclub didn't even exist, and the patches that did were terrible to look at. Now, the game's environments and landscapes were breathtaking, but terrain was never a strong point visually for Driveclub. On the last version of Driveclub on PC, that problem was only exacerbated. With v0.10.0, grass is now in the game, and there's an overall coat of polish that's apparent. However, it comes with big losses, as it no longer comes with dynamic shadows. The vibrance and clarity of clear skies has also been lost to the latest update, and the game, even when you tweak the weather settings, only shows overcast skies.

Additionally, there's still no motion blur in the game's PC-emulated port, which means that Driveclub's biggest strength — its exhilarating sense of speed — doesn't exist in the game at the moment. For starters, there's no motion blur, and then, the 60fps smoothness only makes it worse if you're only in it for the sense of speed.

There are a couple of builds going around right now — one that adds grass but takes away shadows, another that does the opposite, and one that attempts to merge the two. My own attempts to run the game on the latest build of ShadPS4 bore no fruit, but I know that the day I uninstall Forza Horizon 4 — which I keep for the single-player experience alone — is inching closer.

Driveclub

Systems

Released October 7, 2014

ESRB t

Developer(s) Evolution Studios

Publisher(s) Sony Interactive Entertainment

Franchise Driveclub

Any day now, all of Driveclub's problems on PC will be sorted out

I will never come to terms with Sony shutting down Evolution Studios, the devs behind Driveclub. To this day, it's clear that this game, had it been allowed to develop into a proper franchise, could very well have taken on Microsoft's Forza Horizon games. Heck, we never even got a 60fps patch for the PlayStation 5, so a remaster or sequel were truly out of the question.

As such, the closest anyone can get to is playing this amazing racing game on PC via emulation, which not only runs at 60fps at the moment, but will undoubtedly come with visual improvements that PS5 users won't ever get, since the franchise itself is a thing of the past.

Sure, the road so far has been bumpy, but ShadPS4 has been improving massively with each update, and those updates themselves have been rather consistent. So, it's perhaps one of the safest bets in all of gaming right now to wager that Driveclub would be fully playable from start to finish in just a matter of months, all with visual enhancements and running at 60 frames per second. On that day, I think I'll just put in a leave request and dive back into this masterpiece of a racing game.