The PS5 jailbreaking scene keeps making progress almost on a weekly basis. A jailbroken PS5 can now download Windows games from a Steam library and run them locally on the console, with no PC streaming involved. The tool behind it is Playden for PS5, an alpha launcher from developer leolobato that adapts the macOS version of Playden. It lets users sign in to Steam with a QR code, browse their library, download games, and launch each one from its own tile on the PS5 home screen. Under the hood, it relies on prospero-win, a PS5 port of Wine, with DXVK handling the graphics side. Unlike Linux on the PS5, there's no separate OS to boot into, since Playden runs as a regular PS5 app.

Development is moving quickly. The first public release landed on October 12, and version 0.5.0 added Direct3D 12 support through VKD3D-Proton, which, according to the release notes, opens the door to games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Deep Rock Galactic. Version 0.6.0 followed this week with USB and FTP game imports, 120 Hz output and a 4K resolution option. Of course, this is still very much experimental. The compatibility list has a decent number of working games, mostly older and indie titles such as Half-Life 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Vampire Survivors, but plenty of others crash or refuse to start.

Intel's Arc GPU performance on Linux has improved greatly since the early days of the new architecture, but improvements are still being made via updates to the GPU drivers. The latest performance boost comes by way of the addition of frame buffer compression in the DXVK translation layer for Direct3D 8, 9, 10, and 11 games. The new patch comes by way of Mesa 26.3-devel, a new update to the open-source GPU driver stack, and it brings performance improvements previously seen in the VKD3D for DX12 games.

Frame buffer compression is a Linux kernel feature that aims to save memory bandwidth and power consumption by compressing the frame buffer and reducing the amount of memory used by the display. At the time of writing, Mesa 26.3-devel can be downloaded from the Mesa Git, but it, along with global frame buffer compression via DXVK, is expected to land in November when the new version of Mesa ships in the stable branch. Performance improvements, as noted in the merge request, are notable but not necessarily earth-shattering, ranging from 0.53% to just over 5%.