PlayStation 5: How Can Backwards Compatibility Improve PlayStation 4?

General news News PlayStation PlayStation News 04/19/2020

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DigitalFoundry’s new analysis video talks about how Sony‘s new console could improve the performance of games made for the yet current platform.

It makes sense: the new console is stronger, so by definition, it should showcase better performance in games made for older hardware. (If it wasn’t the case, it would be highly scandalous. The exception to the rule would be the PlayStation 3, but we can’t dream of native support there. All we will get is streaming via PlayStation Now…) So the PlayStation 5 will support PlayStation 4 games, but we have yet to see how much of the PS4 library will be supported. (Not all titles will work, but at least the backlash made Sony say more than the „top 100” will run on the PS5…)

DigitalFoundry thinks the PlayStation 4 games with no frame rate cap, and those that use dynamic resolution scaling will benefit the most on the PlayStation 5. (The latter is where a game changes to a lower resolution to maintain performance.) They mentioned two FromSoftware titles as primary examples, namely Dark Souls III and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

The former received a PlayStation 4 Pro patch that eliminated the frame rate cap, and the latter had none, to begin with. The site believes that the base PlayStation 4’s (original model or PlayStation 4 Slim…) CPU is the main reason why the games have a somewhat bad performance. On a PlayStation 5, these titles would easily reach 60 frames per second. Bloodborne wouldn’t work: not only the game has a 30 FPS frame rate cap, but it also has bad frame pacing issues. DigitalFoundry also says that Final Fantasy XV could also run better on new hardware, as it offers several performance modes on a PlayStation 4 Pro.

So with the PlayStation 5, we should expect stable frame rates, higher resolutions, and maybe somewhat improved texture quality in PlayStation 4 titles. (Deep/machine learning could help with the textures). In practice, we’ll see this Holiday season, as that’s when the PlayStation 5 will launch.

Source: WCCFTech

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)