Milestone: PS5 game runs on Steam Deck via emulator for the first time – but only at 0.6 FPS

The Steam Deck handles many demanding PC games surprisingly well – including Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy, all of which carry the “Verified” status. Emulating PS5 games on the handheld, however, has so far seemed almost unimaginable. A user named Ihc160 has now given it a try, launching Astro’s Playroom on the Steam Deck using the PS5 emulator SharpEmu – and reaching a small milestone in the process. A video of the attempt was shared via the official SharpEmu account on X.

The game shown is Astro’s Playroom, which comes pre-installed on every PlayStation 5 and was originally designed to showcase the features of the DualSense controller. The milestone: The game boots. This marks the first known instance of a PS5 title being run directly on the Steam Deck via an emulator. At least, no other publicly documented attempt with a comparable result is known so far. But playable performance is still a long way off. In fact, the platformer currently cannot even get past the PlayStation Studios intro or loading screen. According to the on-screen counter, the frame rate fluctuates between roughly 0.5 and 1 FPS, usually hovering around 0.6 FPS.

Community takes the 0.6 FPS in stride

In the Steam Deck subreddit, the low frame rate has unsurprisingly become a source of jokes. One user describes 0.3 FPS as already being “basically cinematic,” while another points out that this still amounts to 30 frames per minute. Suggestions to use frame generation and upscaling to double the performance to a “smooth” 1.2 FPS are, of course, not entirely serious either.

Behind the jokes, however, there is also some cautious optimism. Several users point out that with a young emulator, the initial goal is less about achieving playable frame rates and more about proving that the software works at all. PS4 emulation is frequently cited as a comparison: It also made little apparent progress for a long time, but can now run games such as Bloodborne at significantly higher frame rates on powerful PCs.

Whether this will eventually lead to playable PS5 games on the Steam Deck remains questionable. While both the PlayStation 5 and Valve’s handheld use AMD processors based on Zen 2 architecture and RDNA 2 graphics, the PS5 has eight CPU cores and 36 Compute Units, while the Steam Deck has to make do with four cores and eight Compute Units. Still, it is not entirely out of the question that individual PS5 games could eventually run on Valve’s handheld.