The original 2005 God of War from the PS2 now runs on Windows as a normal program, with no emulator. gow-native-pc went up on GitHub on October 25, reached version 0.4.0 on November 1 and has 152 stars. You can already play through it, but the developer is clear that heavy fights still fall short of a steady 60 FPS. God of War III Remastered from the PS4 and the PSP games already had fan ports; the first game in the series ran on PC only through emulation until now.
How fast it runs
It is a static recompilation: the PS2's CPU code is translated to C++ with PS2Recomp and built into a Windows program. The game logic is tied to the console's 60 Hz, so the port is capped at 60 FPS. On the developer's test PC, a Xeon E5-2666 v3 with a Radeon RX 580, at 1080p and 2x internal resolution, the opening ship runs at about 55 FPS, heavy fights at 50-53, and a 30-minute session from a later save averaged 48. The CPU is the limit: the heaviest fights take about 19 ms per frame, while 60 FPS needs 16.7. On a Core i3-10110U laptop, combat runs at about 20 FPS.
Only the opening areas have been measured in depth, so later levels may behave differently, and area transitions can bring short hitches with audio gaps. Version 0.4.0 ships a ready-made PGO profile for every CPU, adds a Fast VU mode (about 12% less work in combat, mostly useful on slower CPUs) and a hold-instead-of-mash option for the minigames, and fixes sound cutting out after about 35 seconds of combat.
What you need
- your own disc image of the US release, SCUS-97399, or a recognised fan translation;
- Windows 10 or 11 and a CPU with SSE4.2, ideally four cores or more;
- 8 GB of RAM (16 GB while building) and a GPU with OpenGL 4.3.
The launcher takes three steps: download the tools, pick your disc image and press install, and the game is then built on your PC. No game files are included. Add more than one image, say the original and a translation, and the launcher asks which language you want. It comes in nine languages. In the game, F1 opens a menu with live graphics settings, cheats and memory card backups, and you get internal resolution, FXAA, anisotropic filtering, three graphics profiles, a frame cap, full keyboard and mouse remapping and two gamepad layouts.
Texture packs, mods, a Linux version and a widescreen HUD are planned. God of War II is on the roadmap as well, but no port of it exists yet. Other PS2 recomps, and those from other consoles, are in our recomp list.
Sources
gow-native-pc on GitHub: README (Performance and Known limitations) and notes for 0.3.1 and 0.4.0 (31.10-01.11.2026). DSOGaming, 31.10.2026. Chart by FramesGames from the port developer's measurements.
