--- title: 'Bloodborne PS5: Big Resolution Boosts, 120Hz, VRR - Today''s Mod, Tomorrow''s New Feature?' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=DPZRFNpfdcE' video_id: 'DPZRFNpfdcE' date: 2026-06-16 duration_sec: 0 --- # Bloodborne PS5: Big Resolution Boosts, 120Hz, VRR - Today's Mod, Tomorrow's New Feature? > Source: [Bloodborne PS5: Big Resolution Boosts, 120Hz, VRR - Today's Mod, Tomorrow's New Feature?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DPZRFNpfdcE) ## Summary ## Transcript Bloodborne, the game, the legend. The pervading sense that somehow PlayStation 5 users should be enjoying a massively upgraded experience over the original PS4 presentation. 1080p, 30 frames pers, inconsistent frame pacing. It's a brilliant release, ripe for improvement, and yet boosts over the PS4 showing on PS5 are minimal. A proper remaster seems to be off the table for some reason, but surely there are options. Which leads me to this. Bloodborne in high resolution, 60 frames pers, improved latency, meaning tighter controls, the removal of a heavy chromatic aberration, lens distortion effect, a much cleaner presentation. You'd perhaps think we're using the Shad PS4 emulator running on PC to achieve all of this, but that's not the case. though. Actually, some of the work that went into that definitely helps. But the footage you're seeing here, I guarantee you, is captured from a retail PlayStation 5 console, albeit one running on much older firmware, exploited, patched with system level improvements made to PlayStation 4 support, meaning that what you're seeing is one interpretation of Bloodborne running on PlayStation 5. And the story of how we got here is fascinating. This video is brought to you in association with MSI and the MSI summer kickoff sale is here. Upgrade your setup with huge savings across MSI products. Get up to £500 off desktops, up to 40% off monitors, and deals across components. 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Well, the most recent PlayStation 4 enhanced on PS5 game I tested was Assassin's Creed Unity, and it proves that older games still have a large role to play in the current generation. But, um, these releases have been slowing down. What we're showing here is a proof of concept for improving those legacy games with minimal developer input but maximum impact. This isn't just back compat uh but enhanced back compat taken to a level that Sony itself hasn't delivered but possibly could and that includes incorporating modern console features. So what do I mean by that? Well, here's a preview of what we're going to be doing in this video. Here we've got the PlayStation 5 running Bloodborne in 120 Hz mode, and we're able to turn on VRR at the game's stock 1080p resolution. Bloodborne, the original PS4 code, remember, uh just with mere patches in place with no major recoding. Well, now it's becoming a high frame rate experience. Typically running in excess of 100 frames pers, VRR smoothing out the dips. Kind of seems unbelievable, right? Well, here we are in the PlayStation 5 video settings screen confirming the signal output before we drop back in game. The game in question being Bloodborne. This is the real deal. So, how is this possible? Essentially, the modder Christina is using an exploitable PlayStation 5 retail console and extra memory has been patched in uh for PlayStation 4 games to take advantage of. and CPU and GPU clocks are also being boosted to the maximum frequencies available. Something that doesn't happen with current back compat. So with those patches in place, first order of business from my perspective was to see what kind of experience could be delivered. Well, basic stuff here, but why not play Bloodborne at native 4K? Now, regular Digital Foundry viewers may recall a video we did way back in the day where Christina replaced From Software's 30fps cap with Sony's own half rate VSYNC library. This increased latency, but banished Bloodborne's juttering frame rate issues once and for all. The same patch is used here in addition to 4K resolution and light grid global illumination optimizations. Uh, initially I wasn't too happy with the look of the game, so another mod comes into play. We've removed chromatic aberration. Now, what we can't do is improve anti-aliasing. There's still a lot of shimmering artifacts here. Bloodborne comes from a time before TAA was a thing, so we're kind of stuck on that front. But removing chromatic aberration does deemphasize the issue a little. So, in effect, what we have is what you might call a quality mode for a potential Bloodborne patch with two visual artifacts addressed. the bothersome lens effects and the inconsistent delivery of frames. One other thing caught my eye during my testing. In-game typography seems to scale with resolution, presumably via vector-based fonts. We've boosted resolution here, but text actually holds up rather well. HUD elements though, the bit maps, they still seem to be 1080p. Still look okay though overall, though larger icons do stand out a touch. Performance-wise, we're basically running at a locked 30 frames per second, properly paced. Sounds simple from a modding perspective perhaps, but that extra memory, the extra 4 GB dedicated to the title is required to get a native 4K frame buffer running. Extra CPU and GPU clocks ensure the level of consistency that we're seeing here. But my guess is that many users may prefer a different kind of balance between resolution and performance. So, let's do something that current PS4 back compact can't do and factor in two different system level features. First of all, 120 Hz. Well, I guess we have seen 120 Hz support added to a PS4 app running on PS5. Call of Duty War Zone did it back in the day before native Quintupal support was forthcoming. Turns out that from a modding perspective, 120 Hz is quite easy to implement as is. And well, crucially, we've got our second feature added to the mix, VRR. So, if we unlock Bloodborne frame rate at 1440p, uh, we're generally performing beyond 60 frames pers, sometimes moving into the 70s. You wouldn't experience a vastly different experience to 1440p 60 locked with VSYNC in terms of visual fluidity, but you would gain further reductions in input lag. But once we start engaging with effects heavy boss sequences and basically anything that throws around a lot of volumetrics, even standard gameplay, frame rates can dip beneath 60 frames per second. The good news at least is that for the vast majority of play, we are above 48 fps, meaning that we remain within the PS5's VRR window, even when there's some pretty crazy stuff playing out on screen. But let's finalize the 120 Hz VRR tests with a look at 1080p, the native resolution of the PS4 version, and where we almost hit a 4x multiplier in performance terms. Well, actually, the numbers suggest uh something closer to a 3.5x boost to pixel throughput with 105 frames pers. Dropped frames basically unnoticeable with adaptive sync support. Yes, dropping down to full HD isn't ideal, of course, but it's not as if full HD is actually a thing of the past in the modern era. And the frame rate benefits are obvious. More to the point, it's a PS4 game that has an associated expectation level. Nobody is expecting like a full-on PS5 experience here. Uh, one final point about VLR support. As seen here, support for low frame rate compensation requires bespoke developer input from the SDK. at 120 hertz here. We need to keep frame rates in a 48 to 120 fps window to see the benefit. And yeah, thankfully that's not an issue here at 1080p. And even when pushing into boss territory with all the effects work in play that made 1440p drop beneath 60fps doesn't seem to bother the PS5 here at full HD. 120 Hz VR. Now, that's a very cool thing, of course, but I'd bet good money that if the PS5 audience and Bloodborne fans were asked for their opinions. None of the options seen so far would be the ideal onesizefits-all solution. 4K 30, 120 Hz, and VRR file those under nice to have as opposed to having one option that offers a good balance of um yeah, pixel counts and performance. Similar to back compat patches we've seen in the past like The Last of Us Part Two and Days Gone. Uh just to name a couple, chances are there'd be one single locks configuration. Just to keep things simple, the footage we've seen so far suggests that 1440p is that best all round answer. And actually playing Bloodborne at 1440p with a frame rate cap removed basically gives users a highly compelling option. With chromatic aberration off, the visuals hold up very, very nicely at this resolution, while gameplay is so so smooth with significant input lag reductions compared to the standard 30fps. We've shown Bloodborne running in the past at 60, right, way back when PS5 launched actually, but to get that alongside a 78% increase to resolution would be a massive crowd-pleaser. And that's kind of what we're showing here. Now, most of the game segments we played ran very well indeed. locked to the required frame rate. But yeah, those heavy transparency elements cause problems. And as we've already seen, performance can drop beneath 60 frames per second, typically within a 50 to 60 window here, which isn't totally ideal, but again, perhaps the best balance overall between visual fidelity and frame rate. Yeah, the more you look at some of these crazy boss fights, the more dips you may see. And uh in my testing, I just looked at the first five or so confrontations. I mean, there is another route forward, I guess. Taking a page out of Assassin's Creed Unity's recent 60fps patch, we downsized resolution to 1296p, and it did seem to solve pretty much all of the frame rate drops. It still looks presentable, of course, but maybe just a cut too far. I mean 1440p is stable for the majority of play and based on my experiments with the patches here. It looks like if 120 Hz and VR are disabled, you get 1440p at 60 Hz anyway. So maybe one mode can serve two audiences there. But let's talk viability here of all of this actually happening cuz it's pretty exciting stuff, right? What would actually need to happen for a demonstration like this to become a reality? First of all, at the system level, PlayStation 4 titles on PS5 would need that extra memory to run higher resolutions. Bloodborne at 1440p on standard PS5 memory allocation isn't stable. Native 4K, forget it. Optionally, access to PS5 level CPU and GPU clocks would certainly aid and stabilize performance. Finally, a lot of these games aren't receiving updates because they were developed on ancient SDKs, while porting them to the latest SDK just isn't viable. That being the case, there would need to be a system level patching system um similar to what's being used here to produce these impressive results. That's a fair amount of upfront effort for Sony. But I think we've demonstrated the win here. And let's just say that it's not just Bloodborne that stands to benefit. There's a whole range of PS4 games that could gain a new lease of life with this sort of system in place. So, that's the end of the video almost because we still have some outstanding questions that we're looking into. Do games built with PS4 Pro support benefit from access to extra compute units on PS5? Uh, cuz we kind of expected more from Bloodborne than a 4x boost to pixel throughput. Remember, Bloodborne isn't pro enabled. We've also noticed that the AC Unity patch for PS5 actually adds PS4 Pro support. It just doesn't do anything on actual PS4 Pro hardware. So, I'd imagine that 4 Pro functionality may add a little extra memory. But, is anything else going on there? We just don't know at the moment, but we want to find out. Meanwhile, are CPU and GPU clocks different from standard back compat? Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. We're going to need to look into that as well. I'll level with you. I'm still kind of baffled that AC Unity on Xbox Series X runs at a much higher resolution than PS5 when in current gen titles the two systems are so closely matched. These are questions we'll hopefully answer another time, but for now, please do like, subscribe, share, and ring the bell for notifications and such like. patreon.com/digitalfoundry to support the team. It makes time-consuming investigations like this actually viable. 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