Devran Cosmo Uenal has shown the PlayStation 5 version of Quake II running on an Xbox Series X, a small but striking step for PS5 games running on Xbox hardware. In a YouTube video that went live on September 8, he played with an Xbox controller through PS5X, his Xbox port of the open-source PS5 emulator KytyPS5.
The demo is drawing attention now because it turns a long-running emulation idea into something visible on a real console. Uenal said he has also gotten three more PS5 games working, and PS5X now runs the PS5 versions of GEX Trilogy, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, Marvel Cosmic Invasion and Quake II. All four of those games respond to Xbox controller inputs, and some of them even have working sound.
That matters because the consoles from Sony and Microsoft were built around closely matched AMD hardware, with eight Zen 2 CPU cores, RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of GDDR6 memory on each side. PS5 games are compiled for the same x86-64 processor architecture used by PCs, which helps explain why the code can get as far as booting on Xbox hardware at all. But the path is still narrow. PS5X only works inside the console's official Developer Mode, Microsoft's documentation caps games at 5GB of memory there, and Uenal has not made the project publicly downloadable.
The technical catch is bigger than the headline makes it look. KytyPS5 translates PS5 graphics commands and recompiles shaders for Vulkan, but Xbox Developer Mode only supports DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. Uenal wrote that everything has to be translated to DirectX because Vulkan is not supported, which means PS5X inherits only the fixes that can be adapted for that setup. In other words, progress on PC does not move over automatically.
Even so, the project is no longer just a proof of concept. Uenal described PS5X as a research project for running PS5 homebrew and game backups on a Series X in Developer Mode, while also saying it does not include PS5 firmware or decryption keys. RPCS3's documentation lists KytyPS5 and SharpEmu as the two active open-source PS5 emulators that can boot games, and recent reports on PC emulation have pointed to stronger results there, including one clip of Marvel's Wolverine reaching its main menu on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. PS5X has not shown a PS5 exclusive yet, and Uenal has said compatibility is limited and that it is early days.
For now, the most important fact is the simplest one: a PS5 game is running on an Xbox Series X, but only in a controlled Developer Mode setup that still has a long way to go before it looks like anything close to broad compatibility.
