shadPS4 v0.21.0 "Until Mavethee Dawn" lands two weeks after v0.20, with a long list of PS4 library and GPU fixes

The PS4 emulator shadPS4 has a new stable release. v0.21.0, codenamed "Until Mavethee Dawn", went up on GitHub on October 30, about two weeks after v0.20.0 and its shadNet online server. The team's own summary is "another week another release", and the changelog is long. Builds are out for Windows, Linux and macOS, so it's ready for Windows handhelds like the ROG Ally and Legion Go and for SteamOS devices.

Fixes you might notice in games

• Platinum trophies unlock again. A bug stopped the platinum from ever popping.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and 3 no longer hang waiting on a microphone; the emulator now reports a disconnected mic.
• Add-on content loads from linked services and gets its entitlement keys, so more DLC should be picked up.
• Timezone and daylight saving times are calculated correctly.
• The DualShock 4 touchpad reports its real height, and analog smoothing checks where an input came from.
• PS4 Pro (Neo) mode handling is improved.

Under the hood

On the library side there's a rewritten NP authentication layer, a music player service, USB storage support, better leaderboard (np_score) data, file locking and a pile of kernel return-code fixes that make games behave more like they do on a real console. The graphics core gets part two of its garbage collector, several texture cache fixes for stale or overwritten images, stencil-only depth targets and PM4 streamout. The shader recompiler adds a fast_shader_math setting that relaxes float rules for speed, plus fixes for control flow and geometry shader cuts. Mac users on Apple Silicon also get workarounds for Rosetta 2 crashes.

Should you update?

If you play PS4 games on a PC handheld, yes: it's a stable build, and the trophy and DLC fixes alone are worth it. Grab it from the official shadPS4 releases page, and see our emulators hub for the Android options built on shadPS4's core. As always, you need games dumped from your own PS4; we don't link to firmware or game files.

Source: shadPS4 v0.21.0 release notes on GitHub. Facts verified against the original report; written by Overclocked.