Digital Foundry: updating games from PS4 to PS5 turned out to be easier than expected, but how it works remains a mystery

Digital Foundry Specialist Richard Leadbetter has released a technical analysis of a recent patch that improved the action-platformer Ratchet & Clank‘s backward compatibility mode on PS5.

The mentioned update promised to make Ratchet & Clank work on the new Sony console at a stable 60fps instead of 30fps. Digital Foundry made sure that this is what happened in the end.

As Ledbetter found out during her tests, thanks to the Ratchet & Clank patch, she learned in an unknown way to recognize what is functioning on the PS5. This, in turn, removes the frame-rate limitation.

Until recently, it was assumed that to improve the performance of PS4 games on PS5; studios would have to rebuild them using more modern SDKs (development kits).

As it turned out, this is not so: at the heart of the updated Ratchet & Clank is an old (according to Ledbetter, it is “several years old” ) SDK, which may open the way for a similar upgrade for other projects with PS4.

Modder Lance McDonald commented on Leadbetter’s discovery on his microblog: “The obvious intermediate conclusion is here: Bloodborne can theoretically be officially made to work at 60fps (not 4K, for this you need the SDK from the PS4 Pro) without updating the SDK. So the task is even easier than we thought. Why the hell is nobody doing this? “

Bloodborne was released in March 2015 exclusively on PlayStation 4. In February 2021, McDonald added unofficial 60fps support to the game, and specialists from Digital Foundry demonstrated the work of this homemade patch on PS5.