Jailbroken PS5s Can Now Run Steam Games Through Bazzite

Picture a PS5 that switches on and shows you the Steam Deck’s home screen. Same Game Mode menus, same Steam store, your Steam library, on the TV the PS5 is already plugged into. That’s what a hobby project first released on October 20 does: it starts Bazzite, a Linux system built for Steam gaming, on a PS5 from a USB drive. Then there’s the part making the headlines. The PS5’s graphics chip has 40 compute units, Sony only ever switched on 36, and this project can switch on the other four. Here’s which PS5s can actually do this, what works, and why that 40 is less exciting than it sounds.

Can a PS5 run Steam games now?

Yes, if it’s jailbroken and on the right older version of Sony’s system software. A jailbreak is a hack that lets a console run software Sony didn’t approve. Linux on the PS5 rides on a flaw in older versions of Sony’s system software, and a separate community loader uses that flaw to start Linux. As of October 29, those loaders cover a patchwork of versions that tops out at 13.60, and not every version below it works, which GamingOnLinux has been tracking as it grew.

That’s a closing window. Sony released 13.60 on July 23, then 14.00 on September 16, 14.10 on October 2 and 14.20 on October 21. Any PS5 that has installed an update since mid-September is already past the line. Tom’s Hardware reports that 14.20 patched the flaw itself, while Sony’s own update note says only that it improved “the messages and usability on some screens.”

What is Bazzite, and what does this project add?

Bazzite is a free Linux system made for gaming, built by Universal Blue on top of Fedora, with Steam already installed. Its Deck version skips the desktop and boots straight into Steam Gaming Mode, the full-screen interface the Steam Deck uses.

The PS5 build comes from an independent developer who goes by Gilles. Linux itself isn’t new on hacked PS5s: a public way to boot it has been out since April. Game Mode was the missing piece. Bazzite’s Steam session needs two features in the Linux kernel, the core of the system, that the PS5’s Linux builds didn’t have, so Game Mode kept crashing back to the desktop. This build switches them on.

It boots from a USB drive, and the developer says the PS5 itself isn’t changed: restart it or turn it off, and it starts Sony’s own system again. The project is moving fast, too. It’s nine days old and has already put out more than two dozen releases, several of them on October 29 alone, the day it added the PS5 Pro.

What are the 40 compute units, and should you turn them on?

A compute unit is one of the building blocks of a graphics chip. More of them at the same speed means more graphics work done at once. The PS5 runs 36, a number Mark Cerny gave when he walked through the PS5’s hardware in 2020. For scale, the Steam Deck has 8.

The chip itself has 40. The developer says Sony switched four off at the factory, partly because on some chips one of them is faulty. That’s normal chipmaking: turn off a few spares on every chip, and every console behaves the same, even the ones where a unit came out bad. Hackaday covered the same idea in June on the BC-250, a crypto mining board built around a chip from the same family, which ships with only 24 of its 40 switched on.

What the headlines leave out is how that setting started: for about two and a half hours, all 40 were on by default. Version 1.1.0 turned them on for everyone at 11:23 UTC on October 23. At 12:00, a user posted photos of glitches on screen. At 13:55, version 1.1.1 made it opt-in again. On some consoles, the developer wrote, the extra four cause green dots, a purple tint or crashes, and “that’s the silicon lottery.”

So it’s a setting now, off unless you turn it on, for the original PS5 and the Slim. On paper, 40 instead of 36 is 11% more compute units, which at the PS5’s top speed of 2.23 GHz works out to about 11.4 teraflops instead of Sony’s 10.3. That’s my arithmetic, and nobody has published a measurement of what it does in a game. The PS5 Pro is left out on purpose. Sony says its GPU has 67% more compute units than the PS5’s, which comes to 60, and the developer says the unlock isn’t for the Pro.

Which PS5s does it work on?

The original PS5, the Slim and, since October 29, the PS5 Pro, which the developer calls a first version and wants test reports for. On every model, the firmware rule above still decides it.

What works, and what doesn’t?

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the DualSense and hardware video decoding all work on the original PS5 and the Slim. The Pro build is a day old, and so far the developer has confirmed its graphics chip, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Every PS5 gets 4K at 60Hz and 1080p at 120Hz over HDMI. Past that, it comes down to which HDMI chip is inside your console. Most have one that also does 4K and 1440p at 120Hz, HDR and VRR. Some later models have a different chip that doesn’t do any of those yet.

PSVR2 is halfway there: the front USB-C port can be set to drive the headset, but the VR software it needs isn’t included. Sleep works, though the graphics chip stays on and it uses a lot of power, so the developer suggests turning it off for longer breaks. And the first start is slow, with Steam quietly updating itself behind a blank screen for a few minutes.

What games run, and how well?

Players have reported Horizon Zero Dawn, Palworld, Genshin Impact, RimWorld and XCOM 2, the last one on a PS5 running 11.20. Those are player reports rounded up by VideoCardz, and they aren’t tests.

How well they run is still an open question. Nobody has published frame rates for this build, and the developer’s notes list a few rough edges, like the occasional freeze when Game Mode starts from the desktop.

Has Sony said anything?

No. There’s no statement, and GitHub’s public archive of takedown notices has nothing from PlayStation for September or October, checked through October 28. So far, Sony’s answer is the firmware.

That’s the real catch for a PS5 owner. Tom’s Hardware notes that the latest games often require the latest system software, and installing it ends the Linux option on that console, as things stand. For the record, I own a PS5.