Sony is facing a new crisis regarding the technical performance of their PlayStation 5 consoles, but this time, it affects all the models.
As shared by Digital Foundry, the PlayStation 5 has a stuttering issue. This affects both the PlayStation 5 and the PlayStation 5 Pro, and has nothing to do with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony’s homegrown upscaling solution that surprisingly turned out to be the source of a lot of the PlayStation 5 Pro’s woes.
As a brief refresher, VRR, or variable refresh rate, is a new framerate solution that ensures that your game appears stable even if there are slight dips or raises in framerate. Prior to VRR, developers had to choose to lock consoles to 30 or 60 FPS. The variety of options now may seem confusing to some gamers, but if you dig deep into the games and tried them out, you would know that choice allows you to customize your experience to what would please you the most. This is all possible because of VRR.
Unfortunately, the issue is that a stutter starts to appear on PlayStation 5 games that occurs every eight seconds. The reason the issue took a while to detect is that it doesn’t appear in the first 20 minutes of playing a game. Digital Foundry eventually decided to investigate after the received a sufficient number of viewer communications asking them to check.
Digital Foundry stated that they tested multiple setups and confirmed that this was not an issue isolated to a single model or brand of monitor. Surprisingly, they also found this issue in some of Sony’s own games, such as The Last Of Us Parts 1 and 2.
This is not an issue present in every single game you can play on PlayStation 5, but it’s prevalent enough that it is a concern. And it appears under a specific set of circumstances: for games that support unlocked framerates on 120Hz refresh rates.
So games that have set framerates on 120Hz, even a lower 40FPS, won’t have this issue. But another situation where this issue doesn’t come up is if you play these games on an Xbox Series console or a PC build.
We won’t retell the entire story again, but we’re sure you’re already well aware how PSSR has taken the shine off of the PlayStation 5 Pro. But this issue with VRR brings into question the value of the PlayStation 5 consoles.
Because we believe that this is an issue that Sony can find a solution for, in the same way that we do believe that they will eventually iron out the issues surrounding PSSR. But as a consumer, one should question if they felt misled into the hype cycles if the PlayStation 5 platforms was really as good as they believed.
