An Xbox Series X can now run PlayStation 5 games, but there’s a catch

In a YouTube video uploaded on September 8, developer Devran Cosmo Uenal booted up the PlayStation 5 version of Quake II on an Xbox Series X and played it with an Xbox controller. But the game ran through PS5X, Uenal’s Xbox port of the open source PS5 emulator KytyPS5, and it ran three other PS5 games in parallel.

The fact that it managed to run PS5 games on an Xbox is super cool, but there’s a catch: the PS5X only works in the console’s official developer mode, where Microsoft’s documentation limits games to 5GB of memory. This unfortunately excludes the majority of current-gen games, and there is no public download yet for anyone to try.

Sony and Microsoft have built their current consoles around closely matched AMD hardware. Both feature eight Zen 2 CPU cores, RDNA 2 graphics, and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, and PS5 games are compiled for the same x86-64 CPU architecture used by PCs. This means that the KytyPS5 emulator can run its code on the host CPU instead of recreating the PS5 hardware in software. Its developer calls it a compatibility layer, and in practice it behaves more like a translator, converting what a PS5 game asks for into something a PC can understand.

KytyPS5 translates the PS5’s graphics controls and recompiles its shaders for Vulkan. Therefore, he needs a Vulkan 1.3 graphics card on PC, but Xbox Developer Mode only supports DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. “As Vulkan is not supported, everything needs to be translated to DirectX,” Uenal wrote in the description of the YouTube video, where he also admitted that AI was involved in the work. As VideoCardz pointed out, this means that the fixes the KytyPS5 team made to its PC rendering engine must be adapted before the PS5X can use them.

Uenal’s video also describes the PS5X as a “research project” to “run homebrew and PS5 game saves” on a Series X in developer mode. It claims it doesn’t include any PS5 firmware or decryption keys, and KytyPS5’s documentation tells users to stick to game files they obtained legally. Dodging copy protection is ultimately what killed Switch emulator Yuzu, whose creators settled a lawsuit against Nintendo in 2024 by paying $2.4 million and shutting down the project. The team behind PS3 emulator RPCS3 lists KytyPS5 and SharpEmu as the two active open source PS5 emulators capable of starting games and warns gamers about scam sites pretending to be real.

At the time of writing, PS5X is running PS5 versions of GEX Trilogy, Hellboy: The Wyrd’s Web, Marvel Cosmic Invasion And Earthquake IIand all four are compatible with Xbox controller inputs. Some of them sound functional, and TweakVille believes that Earthquake II runs at around 25 to 45 frames per second in Uenal’s footage. It’s worth noting that these four games are also sold on other platforms, so there’s no sign yet that the PS5X will feature a PS5 exclusive, and Uenal admits that it’s still early days and compatibility is limited.

Android Authority reported on September 28 that KytyPS5 was now in-game in a variety of PS5 titles on PC, and that a user had shown Marvel’s Wolverine reaching its main menu, in slow motion, on a machine equipped with an NVIDIA RTX 5090. This clip didn’t show any gameplay, however, and it’s unclear if it was using the standard emulator version. PS5 emulation on PC is becoming more viable by the week, but it’s still an extremely nascent area, and the PS5X only inherits any progress once each patch has been rebuilt for DirectX and squeezed into a much smaller memory budget.

Microsoft limits developer mode games to a relatively small 5 GB of memory and applications to 1 GB. Requests for memory larger than this allocation fail. In contrast, a retail Series This leaves the PS5X running on about 37% of the memory a normal Xbox game can use, making it an obvious choice for big current-gen releases. Microsoft only lifts this cap when the software runs through the Visual Studio debugger, which is a setup designed for developers testing their code.

Microsoft blocked emulators entirely from normal Xbox retail mode in 2023, its justification being a store policy that bans products that emulate a gaming system. It then began bringing down the ban hammer and reportedly imposed 15-day suspensions on players who found a workaround. Since then, gamers who want to play PS2 or GameCube games through, for example, Dolphin, the most popular GameCube emulator, have to rely on Developer Mode instead. But a console in this mode cannot load retail games until it is restored.

The Xbox Series X comes with the same Zen 2 architecture and RDNA 2 graphics as a PS5. It also has the same amount of memory, and the PS5X can use less than a third of that. But none of that really matters because of the memory cap. There’s no real workaround without jailbreaking, meaning Xbox gamers won’t benefit from the progress made on PC. Sure, the PS5X is interesting, but it will remain an interesting little curiosity rather than anything important gamers can use.

If you want to check out PS5X and similar emulation projects, you should exercise caution. Fraudsters are capitalizing on the interest generated by these projects, for example by publishing malware under similar names, such as PCS5X, to try to lure players into downloading them.