Doom 3 BFG for PlayStation 5

A PS5 homebrew port of RBDOOM-3-BFG, Robert Beckebans' modern engine for Doom 3 BFG Edition.

The game runs natively on the console at 3840x2160, drawn with Vulkan through RADV (Mesa's AMD driver, ported to the PS5). It plays the BFG Edition's three campaigns, Doom 3, Resurrection of Evil and The Lost Mission, and has the classic Doom and Doom II built in.

It needs a PS5 that already runs homebrew, and your own copy of Doom 3 BFG Edition's data. No game data, id Software or Bethesda artwork, Sony software or keys are included.

This is an unofficial port. It is not part of RBDoom3BFG and is not supported by it: please do not take PS5 problems to the RBDoom3BFG project. Report them here.

This is an early release: 1.0

It is not fully tested. It was brought up on one console on 2026-10-14 and played through the start of the Doom 3 campaign. Resurrection of Evil, The Lost Mission and the classic games have not been played on a PS5. Expect faults, and keep a copy of your saves.

What you need

• A PS5 that runs homebrew, with etaHEN (or an equivalent), ShadowMountPlus (which shows folders in /data/homebrew as games) and an FTP server.

• Doom 3 BFG Edition's base folder. On Steam, the game sold as DOOM 3 (app 208200) includes the BFG Edition for its owners. The folder is the Windows one, so either copy it from a Windows Steam install (steamapps/common/DOOM 3 BFG Edition/base), or fetch it on any computer with DepotDownloader, signing in to your own Steam account:

  DepotDownloader -app 208200 -os windows -username YOUR_STEAM_LOGIN -dir doom3bfg
  

  It is the folder full of .resources files (with maps/, video/, wads/ and so on). The original Doom 3's pak000.pk4...pak008.pk4 are not used.

• RBDoom3BFG's three data packs, from its 1.6.0 release (the full 7z): base/_rbdoom_core.pk4, base/_rbdoom_blood.pk4 and base/_rbdoom_global_illumination_data.pk4.

Installing

Download Doom3BFG-PS5-v<version>.zip from the releases page and unzip it (or build the title folder yourself: see Building it yourself). Then with an FTP program (FileZilla, Cyberduck, WinSCP) copy, into /data/homebrew/ on the console:

1. The whole PPSA99313 folder.
2. Your whole BFG Edition base folder, into PPSA99313/ (it joins the title's own base folder; replacing files it asks about is fine).
3. The three _rbdoom_*.pk4 files, into PPSA99313/base/.

/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/eboot.bin
/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/sce_sys/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/sce_module/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/licenses/
/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/base/renderprogs2/            (the title's shaders)
/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/base/_common.resources        (your base folder's files)
/data/homebrew/PPSA99313/base/_rbdoom_core.pk4         (and the other two packs)

That is about 9 GB. "Doom 3 BFG" then appears on the home screen. If it does not, check that the folder is exactly /data/homebrew/PPSA99313/ with eboot.bin directly inside it, and that ShadowMountPlus is running. The first start takes about 40 seconds to reach the menu.

To update, copy the new release's PPSA99313 folder over the old one. Your game data, saves and settings are left alone.

Playing

RBDoom3BFG's own controller layout:

DualSense	In the game
Left stick, right stick	Move, look
R2	Fire
L2	Flashlight
L1, R1	Previous, next weapon
Cross	Jump
Square	Reload
Triangle	Use
D-pad	Weapon shortcuts
Touch pad button	PDA
Options	Menu

The gamepad is always on: the PC game starts with it switched off, and the PS5 build turns it on at every launch.

Blood reflections start as Static; System Options switches them to Dynamic (screen-space reflections).

Saves and settings are kept in /data/homebrew/PPSA99313/userdata/.

Extra settings. A file userdata/args.txt is read at start-up as a command line, for example +set com_showFPS 1 for a frame counter, or +set logFile 1 for a log in userdata/base/qconsole.log. There is no log by default: on the console every write to the title's folder takes about 145 ms, so a log costs frames.

Status

Tested on one console (PS5, firmware 13.60) on 2026-10-14, with the Steam BFG Edition data. "Seen" means it ran there and was watched by a person playing, looked at in the console's own screenshots, or read in the title's log. Nothing else is claimed.

Area	Seen on the console	Not yet verified
Start-up	The BFG Edition menu, the Doom 3 menu, a new game	Resurrection of Evil, The Lost Mission, Doom, Doom II
Rendering	3840x2160 on Vulkan (RADV); the first areas look right; the flashlight beam (see below)	Everything past the start of the campaign
Frame rate	The menus hold 60; the counter showed 59 to 90 in the first areas	Heavier areas; a long session
Input	The DualSense in the menus and in play	Rumble; a second controller
Saving	Autosaves and saves are written	Loading them after a restart
Sound	OpenAL Soft starts	A careful listen

Known problems

• The Resolution option has no effect. The title always draws at the console's output size (3840x2160 on a 4K screen; a 1080p screen gets the same picture scaled down). Making the option choose a real 1080p, 1440p or 2160p mode is planned.
• The three Vertical Sync choices behave the same. The console's display presents with v-sync only. The title asks for 120 Hz output, and in doing so turns the system's VRR off; both are to be reworked so that the choices mean something (60 locked, uncapped to 120, and VRR).
• "Restart Now" after changing the frame rate restarts the title through the system; this is new and not yet tried on a console.
• The first start takes about 40 seconds to reach the menu. Not yet looked into.
• The flashlight's dust beam is replaced. The original beam adds a dust texture through the framebuffer's alpha, which RBDoom3BFG's HDR renderer draws as a hard, grainy wedge. The title ships its own material (ps5/base/materials/_ps5_flashlight.mtr): a faint glow in the beam's shape, without the dust.

What the console needed

For the curious, and for anyone porting something similar. All of it is in ps5/patches/rbdoom3bfg.patch and ps5/.

• Vulkan with no loader. RADV is linked into the title, so the engine's vulkan.hpp dispatcher, NVRHI and VMA take every command from RADV's own entry point; SDL2 gets a video driver that hands out a VK_KHR_display surface on the console's one display.
• Shaders built ahead of time. RBDoom3BFG compiles its HLSL to SPIR-V with DXC; that happens on the build machine, and DXC is built from source there for an arm64 host (ps5/tools/setup-dxc.sh).
• One ISPC kernel. The engine's BC6H encoder (for its baked lighting) is ISPC code, compiled on macOS (whose ISPC has an x86 backend) and linked as an object (ps5/tools/ispc-kernel.sh).
• Sound through openal-soft, built with SDL2 as its only backend.
• A pad that arrives late. The console reports the DualSense just after the engine looks for controllers; the engine now opens one when it is added.
• The console's C library is FreeBSD's: a few calls a Linux build expects (fnmatch, strsignal, execl, <malloc.h>) are answered by the port.
• Paths, restarting and logging: data in the title's folder, saves in userdata/, a restart through sceSystemServiceLoadExec, and no log file unless asked for.

Building it yourself

The port is built on Linux (an arm64 or x86-64 machine or VM) with LLVM 22, PS5_PayloadSDK and PS5_Vulkan with its RADV archive built. One step, the ISPC kernel, needs macOS or an x86-64 Linux machine.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/griches/PS5_Doom3.git && cd PS5_Doom3
ps5/tools/ispc-kernel.sh       # on macOS or x86-64 Linux: build/ispc/kernel.o
export PS5_VULKAN_DIR=/path/to/PS5_Vulkan PS5_PAYLOAD_SDK_FORK=/path/to/PS5_PayloadSDK
ps5/tools/build.sh             # applies the patch, builds dist/PPSA99313/
ps5/tools/shaders.sh           # builds DXC once, then the shaders into the title

From a Mac with the Linux VM set up as ps5 in Lima, ps5/tools/vm.sh build and ps5/tools/vm.sh shaders do the same (and vm.sh build runs the ISPC step first). ps5/tools/setup-source.sh --save writes changes made under vendor/RBDOOM-3-BFG back to the patch. ps5/tools/console-files.sh uploads game data from data/game/ to the console.

Credits

• Robert Beckebans and the RBDoom3BFG contributors, for RBDOOM-3-BFG. This port is theirs with a console's worth of glue.
• id Software, for releasing the Doom 3 BFG Edition source under the GPL.
• Mihawk, for PS5_Vulkan, PS5_Mesa, PS5_PayloadSDK and the PS5 Vulkan Template this port's platform layer comes from.
• NVIDIA for NVRHI and ShaderMake; the SDL, openal-soft, Mesa, DXC and ISPC projects; and DepotDownloader.

Licence

GPL-3.0 as built; each part keeps its own licence. LICENSING.md says which covers what, and what is not covered at all: the game, RBDoom3BFG's data packs and trademarks.

Doom 3 is id Software's. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by id Software, ZeniMax, Bethesda or Sony Interactive Entertainment.