One of the most anticipated features of the new PlayStation Plus formula is causing outrage and anger is brewing.
If Sony relied heavily on its catalog of retro games by surfing on backward compatibility, it obviously forgot one thing essential for its proper functioning: optimization.
Rule N°1: think about blind spots when looking in the mirror
Since its deployment in Asia, the PlayStation Plus has been revealed for better and for worse. While overall users seem satisfied, everyone agrees that backward compatibility at Sony is a disaster.
To make it simple, most retro games (especially PS1) were already difficult to stabilize on PS5, despite attempts to make them more pleasing to the eye. Framerate drops, graphical instability, visual artifacts… the list of issues was starting to grow, prompting Sony to respond quickly with an update.
Except here, instead of fixing things, the patch literally broke everything. Currently, many titles are suffering from serious graphic problems and some have even become completely unplayable, in particular because of an even slower framerate than on the original versions and a huge ghosting problem (see images below), a graphical bug that causes big streaks on the screen, especially during camera changes. Moreover, some even blame the PAL versions.
Sony has released a patch for a few PS1 Classics on the PS4/PS5 that “improves” the PAL output.
The patch upscales the PAL code to 60hz by blending frames.
But the technique has introduced these horrible ghosting artifacts.
Here’s a before and after comparison.#ps5 #ps4 pic.twitter.com/S1yphRrKuQ
— Windy Corner TV – Robert (@windycornertv) May 27, 2022
As of now, Sony has yet to communicate on the matter or roll out a new patch, and even if one does arrive, gamers are angry.
Moreover, Digital Foundry decided to dig a little and test the different games to measure their performance and the results are something to smile about since the PS5 manages to do less well than the PS4, and sometimes even than the PS3.
We suspect that all this should be quickly resolved, but as it stands, it makes the PlayStation Plus Premium, sold at €120 a year, much less sexy. In any case, we now understand why backward compatibility was complicated on Sony’s next-gen consoles. But we understand Jim Ryan a little less when he tells us that retro games are splendid on PS5, for the moment anyway.
Unless Jim is from the future?
