Shadow of the Colossus (PS4, CUSA08809) on PC

Unofficial. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Sony Interactive Entertainment, Bluepoint Games or the shadPS4 project.

This project starts one game, Shadow of the Colossus (2018, CUSA08809), from a single program on Windows, with keyboard, mouse and controller support, PC graphics settings, an uncapped frame rate, a free play mode and an achievements panel.

It has two parts:

• This repository: the scripts and settings around the program (build, install, settings pages, key pictures, test and measurement scripts).
• The runtime, a game-specific build of shadPS4, a PlayStation 4 emulator. It lives in this repository too, on the branch runtime, and is checked out into the runtime folder as a submodule.

It is not a recompilation or a decompilation. The game's own PlayStation 4 program runs unchanged on the runtime, which translates its system and graphics calls to Windows and Vulkan.

No game file is here and none may be added. You need your own copy of the game.

How it runs

Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Radeon RX 9060 XT, 1080p, frame rate uncapped. Average / 1% low FPS:

Preset	Gaius arena	Field with Agro	Valus arena
Low	77 / 40	114 / 63	89 / 45
Medium	61 / 34	80 / 39	73 / 42
High	59 / 22	106 / 55	74 / 28
Ultra	59 / 35	102 / 56	81 / 38

Battles and scenes

High preset, 1080p, no frame limit, with the performance readout. Frames of the benchmark videos recorded 2026-10-11 (build 61ad3f5); the averages are over each 24 s recording.

Pelagia, 12th colossus: average 74 FPS	Phaedra, 4th colossus: average 93 FPS
Gaius, 3rd colossus: average 57 FPS	Malus, 16th colossus: average 63 FPS
Basaran, 9th colossus, firing: average 78 FPS	Dirge's desert: average 125 FPS
Phalanx's desert: average 76 FPS	Shrine of Worship: average 54 FPS

Method, the third scene and the requirements: showcase/BENCHMARK.md. Only this one PC has been measured; nothing has been run on Intel or NVIDIA graphics.

How this works

The game is not rewritten. Its PlayStation 4 program file runs as it is, on a runtime that stands in for the console:

• The runtime is a custom build of shadPS4, the open source PlayStation 4 emulator, licensed GPL-2.0-or-later like shadPS4 itself. It was branched from shadPS4 main at commit 945dbc3 (6 October 2026) and carries about a hundred commits on top, all on the branch runtime. The emulator's general parts (loading the program, the system libraries, the translation of PS4 shaders and graphics commands to Vulkan) are shadPS4's work.
• What this build changes is aimed at this one game: fixes for the faults that stopped it from starting and rendering; work on frame rate and frame pacing (saved pipelines, parallel loading, fewer stalls); keyboard and mouse input mapped to the game's button schemes with matching key pictures; mouse use of the game's menus; lines added to the game's own menus (Settings, Free Play, Achievements, Quit); PC graphics options passed to the game's engine; achievements in place of trophies; and a start that goes straight into the game instead of an emulator front end.
• This repository (the wrapper) adds what surrounds the program: build and install scripts, the settings script, the default key layout, the generator for the key pictures, test and measurement scripts, and the documents.
• You supply the game. Nothing of the game is in either part: no program files, data, keys, pictures or sound.

It is one game on one runtime build, not a general emulator release, and nothing here is offered to or endorsed by the shadPS4 project. For any other game use shadPS4 itself.

Where to go

You want to	Read
Build it and play	docs/TUTORIAL.md
Report a problem or send a change	CONTRIBUTING.md
See how fast it runs and how it was measured	showcase/BENCHMARK.md, showcase/PERFORMANCE.md
Read the working notes	showcase/NOTES.txt

State

Playable from the title menu through colossus battles on the one PC it was made on. Treat it as a test version:

• Tested on one PC only: Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB, 32 GB RAM, Windows 11. Intel and NVIDIA graphics cards are untested. Reports from other hardware are the most useful help you can give.
• Not every part of the game has been played through on it.
• Some sounds may still be off: the game's per-sound filters are now applied and loud sounds have headroom, but this is checked by measurement, not yet by ear.

What you need

• Your own, legally obtained copy of the game, dumped from your own console.
• Windows 10 or 11 and a graphics card with Vulkan 1.3.
• To build: Visual Studio 2022 with CMake, Git, PowerShell 7 and the LLVM/Clang toolchain the build*.bat files point to.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/SotC-project/sotc-pc
cd sotc-pc
git submodule update --init runtime
git -C runtime submodule update --init --recursive
build-lto.bat
cd dist
pwsh -File Install.ps1 -GameDir "D:\Games\CUSA08809"

Then start "Shadow of the Colossus" from the desktop shortcut. Every step, the first start, the controls and the settings are explained in docs/TUTORIAL.md.

What is here

Path	What it is
build.bat, build-lto.bat, build-release.bat, build-pgo.bat	Build the runtime (checked out in runtime\)
dist\Install.ps1, Install.bat	Copy the built program beside the scripts, create shortcuts
dist\Settings.ps1	Writes the graphics and display settings; run by Apply and Restart under Settings > Graphics in the game
dist\FreePlay.ps1, Play.bat, PlayColossus.bat	Start the game, or one colossus battle
dist\glyphs.py, dist\glyphs\	Draws the keyboard and Xbox button pictures that replace the PlayStation ones; the pictures are drawn by the script, not taken from the game
dist\user\config.json, dist\user\input_config\	Default settings and key bindings
dist\ini_update.py	Brings an older bindings file up to date
cursor_art.py	Draws the menu pointer (a stone arrowhead) into the runtime's source
publish_filter.py	The filter applied to the runtime before it is published
test.sh, bossarena.sh, preptest.ps1, memwatch.ps1, freeplay_video.sh and the other scripts	Scripted test runs, measurements and captures on a separate test profile
showcase\BENCHMARK.md, PERFORMANCE.md, NOTES.txt	Measurements and notes
upstream\*.patch	Two small general fixes kept apart from the game-specific work

What is not here

• Any file of the game: program, assets, saves, texture or memory dumps, trophy data.
• PlayStation system software, modules, keys or firmware.
• Shader and pipeline caches, logs, built programs, screenshots and video.
• The program icon used on the author's PC (it was drawn after another artist's work). The published runtime uses shadPS4's icon.

Known limits

• One PC tested. A graphics driver reset (seen with a screen recorder running on AMD) closes the game with a message.
• Loading a new area can stall for a moment. Until 11 October 2026 a battle could begin with a stall of one to three seconds: four shaders ask for buffers of about 4 GB, and in one frame 3 GB was bound and uploaded. Those requests are now held to 64 MB (SOTC_UNBOUNDED_CAP_MB sets another size, 0 none). What remains is texture upload under the loading screen: about half a second, once, during which the loading animation holds still. Measured over three minutes in two arenas: nothing over 90 ms once the scene was on screen, apart from one frame of 117 ms.
• The performance readout for benchmark footage (SOTC_PERFHUD=1) shows GPU load on Radeon cards only, from the driver. On the test PC Windows keeps no account of the game's work on the card, so on other makes the line appears only if Windows' own figure works there.
• Until 11 October 2026 the game faulted about once in nine returns to the title menu (14 times in 112 scripted runs). The cause was in the port: a read fault taken while Windows was re-making a mapping the game had partly unmapped was answered by copying old GPU buffer contents over the game's memory. With that corrected, 70 scripted runs of pause > Main Menu > Yes gave no fault (10 more on the release build). Should the game's own program fault for another reason, the port starts the game again and says so.

Licence

The runtime is a derivative of shadPS4 and is licensed GPL-2.0-or-later, with shadPS4's copyright notices kept. The scripts in this repository are under the same licence; see LICENSE.