v0.5.1

🚀 SHADPS4 UPDATE: MOVING TO A NATIVE BUILD FOR UNCHARTED: THE NATHAN DRAKE COLLECTION

Hello everyone! 👋

After the latest updates to shadPS4, I’ve decided to shift my focus toward developing a native PC build of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection.

The main goal of this project is to explore a different approach to running the game on PC. While PS4 emulation requires your computer to simulate the console’s hardware and software, a native PC build aims to run the game directly on Windows, Linux, and potentially macOS, without relying on a PS4 emulator.

💻 Why a Native Build?

One of the biggest challenges with emulation is hardware compatibility and performance. Older or low-end PCs may struggle to run demanding games through an emulator, even when the original console was designed to run them efficiently.

A native build could potentially make the game more accessible to a wider range of PC users by reducing emulation overhead and allowing for better optimization for PC hardware.

🎯 My Focus Going Forward

• Exploring native execution for Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection.
• Investigating the game’s architecture and the technical requirements for a native port.
• Working toward compatibility with Windows, Linux, and macOS where feasible.
• Improving performance and accessibility, especially for older PCs that cannot handle PS4 emulation well.
• Sharing development progress, discoveries, and updates with the community.

⚠️ A Quick Note: This is a challenging development project. A native build is not simply a matter of removing the emulator; it may require substantial work on game code, graphics, system APIs, and platform compatibility. Better performance on older PCs is a goal, not a guarantee.

I’ll focus on Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection for now and share updates as development progresses.

Thank you all for your continued support, patience, and encouragement! ❤️

The next goal: bringing Nathan Drake’s adventure to PC through a native build. 🚀

Stay tuned for more updates!

ShadPS4 Mindro Update 5

Uncharted Custom Build — September 25 Update
This update includes rendering, memory-management, shader-cache, video-playback and audio-decoder changes for the Uncharted-focused custom branch.
This remains a development build. Several reported problems remain unresolved, and stable 60 FPS is not guaranteed.
Rendering and upstream fixes

• Integrated upstream #5092: GPU writes through raw storage buffers now invalidate overlapping cached images, rather than limiting invalidation to formatted writes.
• Integrated upstream #5081: compatible textures differing only in power-of-two padding can reuse an existing cached image, avoiding unnecessary expansion.
• Includes the compute LDS allocation lifetime correction associated with #5070.
• Includes instruction-aware comparison-sampler handling associated with #5020.
• Includes tile-manager pipeline-key corrections that distinguish sample counts and previously conflicting pixel formats. This is not the full #5062 host-shader migration.
  These changes address specific correctness problems; they do not establish that every Uncharted rendering issue is fixed.
  Hair and character rendering
• Retains hair-shading workarounds developed through U1, U2 and U3 testing.
• Users confirmed improvements in several tested scenes, including hair responding more naturally to sunlight.
• Coverage remains incomplete: different chapters, characters and shader variants can still behave differently.
• Facial lighting, eyes, eyelashes and facial hair may still display incorrectly in some scenes.
  Texture-cache corrections
• GPU-dirty images can no longer incorrectly bypass refresh solely because their CPU-side contents appear unchanged.
• Image-change detection now uses a consistent full-image hashing range.
  Known limitation: these corrections did not resolve the reported brightly coloured objects appearing after cinematics. Reloading a save can temporarily clear the corruption, but this is not a permanent fix.
  Memory and stability
• Retains existing allocation safeguards, cache-pressure handling and resource-lifetime changes.
• Includes additional safety checks around video-frame copying and image-copy bounds.
  RAM/VRAM exhaustion remains possible. This build does not guarantee a 6 GB working set or reliable operation on 4 GB GPUs.
  The upstream #5047 sparse-buffer arena architecture is not included in this checkpoint.
  ATRAC9 audio decoder
  Added checks for:
• Decoder initialization failure.
• Short input before reading a RIFF header.
• Insufficient data after header processing.
• Invalid decoded-byte counts.
• Decode failures while draining trailing audio frames.
• Format queries before successful initialization.
  Error messages now include additional decoding context.
  Known limitation: the reported ATRAC9 decoding errors remain unresolved. These checks improve failure handling and diagnostics; they are not a confirmed audio-playback fix.
  Shader caching and performance
• Retains persistent shader/pipeline-cache work.
• Identified a settings mismatch where archive mode could ignore an existing loose-file cache.
  A shader cache can reduce repeated compilation, but it does not eliminate GPU synchronization waits, scene-streaming stalls or all frame-time spikes.
  No verified across-the-board FPS improvement or stable 60 FPS claim is made for this update.
  Remaining known issues
• U3 shirt and sleeve spikes, stretching and excessive scarf deformation.
• Coloured or corrupted textures after cinematics.
• Excessive sunlight brightness in some areas.
• Incorrect face, eye and hair shading in some scenes.
• Cinematic-entry, skip and scene-transition pauses.
• ATRAC9 audio decoding errors.
• Memory-pressure crashes and uneven frame pacing.
  Validation
• Source compiled successfully.
• Relevant automated checks passed during development.
• Some hair improvements were confirmed through user testing.
• The latest texture-refresh and audio-guard trials did not resolve the reported symptoms.
• Full gameplay regression testing across U1, U2, U3 and all Nathan Drake Collection variants is not complete.