PlayStation 5 Backwards Compatibility Tested - And It's Fantastic!

previously on digital foundry without giving anything away and not talking at all about platform comparisons uh i think people are going to be surprised that's that's my takeaway there are surprises here right yes i think we can agree on that hey everyone so yes uh next generation consoles we promised you surprises and here they come playstation 5 backwards compatibility it's not good news it's great news it's amazing news it's it's much better than anything uh that we were possibly imagining and we can imagine quite a lot and joining me to discuss it john linnerman hey rich yeah i think we've both been spending a lot of time playing some ps4 games in here and constantly surprised by how good this is this is awesome yeah it's amazing really because um again this bizarre sort of i'd say like a lack of communication from sony about what we're actually going to be getting there has not been much discussion from sony at all about the situation with backwards compatibility back in march with mark cerny's road to playstation 5 presentation there was this talk of how they're testing the top 100 games but then there was this kind of clarification that this was for i think uh running the games with enhanced aspects of the playstation 5 the faster cpu and the gpu and then there's this kind of massive radio silence right up to the pre-order period and then since then still conflicting messages so i think we need to get this right out in the open every game that we've tested bar perhaps one runs with the full power of the playstation 5 the full cpu clocks the full gpu power and just like xbox series x the effects can be absolutely phenomenal transformative to the point where we're just sort of blown away so what do you reckon about that john yeah absolutely uh the performance boosts in so many of these games it's really transformative to the point where it almost feels like what would have been a remaster in the past like you look back at something like god of war 3 the remastered version on ps4 it kind of feels like you're getting that just about uh just by playing some of these games that already exist on ps4 but i do think it's worth uh pointing out that this is not the same as some games like days gone ghost of tsushima they actually received enhancements separate from the normal bc mode so they actually run at a full 60 frames per second and we'll talk about those in a separate video this is just about games that are designed for ps4 haven't been updated for ps5 and basically we're showcasing the results we got yeah i mean that's pretty amazing just off the bat the fact that you know sony first party games that were you know traditionally locked to 30 frames per second at tsushima days gone i don't think we can understate just how transformed they are running at 60 frames per second i mean this is a topic for another video but we can't not comment about it it's it's pretty amazing but yes you're quite right one thing though caveats that we've got to talk about with backwards compatibility similar to xbox series x which is which is this backwards compatibility cannot break a game that has a 30 fps frame rate limit so uh you know one example here in fact let's show it we've got here rise of the tomb raider running in 4k mode on ps4 pro and yes it's the geothermal valley and it's running pretty much at 30 frames per second it caps out at 30 frames per second there are some dips beneath playstation 5 can clean up those performance drops under 30 but it will not take you above 30 unless you use the 1080p high frame rate mode so that is you know a profound limitation to all of the backwards compatibility solutions here there's nothing that can be done about that unless the developer goes back in and patches the code but even so there's still much to talk about but yeah you know we just need to keep that in mind the one that a lot of people will be talking about would be bloodborne which uh people have been crying out for a 60 frames per second patch for that and uh lance mcdonald actually produced a patch for it a very much unofficial but it did kind of work it was just held back by the lack of horsepower it's clear that it would work perfectly here if it were available it would run the game in a locked 60 i am confident exactly but the fact is that it's not available so it's you know the game hasn't really changed but that said there are so many games so many titles we download thinking that we're going to be getting you know a nice uptick in performance and we're seeing so much more so where should we begin well let's go back to um riser to toonvader yeah i think rise of the tomb raider since we already mentioned it is a good one to talk about uh in that it also has that performance mode which drops the resolution down to 1080p but it targets 60 frames per second it wasn't bad before but it definitely couldn't come close to holding a lock 60 on the pro obviously as you can see here the ps5 has zero issues doing that and i'm fairly certain that if you were to run the higher resolution 4k checkerboard mode with an unlocked frame rate you'd be getting the same results as we're seeing here it's just this is the nature of backwards compatibility but still it's really nice i also tested just worth mentioning i did test shadow of the tomb raider as well on the side that's also lock 60 so tomb raider is looking good on here yep and a game that you covered back in the day final fantasy xv the light mode again similar to xbox series x has a 1080p performance mode it's really i'd say an unsatisfactory experience frame rates can be anything from you know low 30s mid 30s all the way up to 60 but again as you're seeing here playstation 5 just as on xbox series x just lock 60 from start to finish super smooth looks excellent in motion and again i if only they could unlock the frame rate for the higher resolution modes now uh it would yeah i think we'd have 60 in the high-res mode easily yeah we're talking earlier about games that may not be able to hit their 30 frames per second target another classic example here that we're going to see cleaned up again the classic just cause 3 which was severely severely cpu limited basically whenever any kind of huge explosions kicking off and yeah we saw anything below 20 frames per second on the base playstation 4. you only got a marginal uptick in performance on the pro not really worth bothering with but here again the power of the zen 2 cpu cluster in playstation 5. i just put this game really through its paces i didn't see any drops beneath the target 30 frames per second and again i just couldn't see any reason why this game couldn't run at 60 if the if the frame rate cap was was removed there on top of that you know uh the ps4 version i think runs at 1080p so it is a little bit sharper than the xbox one version which would have been limited to 900p on series x so it could still be sharper but it is what it is but i think uh thinking of jungle-like environments the next the next one is one that i think we all wanted to test uh i'd seen this before in the past on series x now we've seen it on ps5 it's crisis crisis remastered uh it has a performance mode it was terrible on the actual ps4 pro and xbox one x i much preferred the more stable modes uh but here it's so nice they included it because it's perfect i mean that's really all i can say about this in terms of performance it's simply perfect yeah it locks at 60 frames per second and we've used our traditional stress test area here the village and you can see on the pro we're so cpu limited there that there are areas where we dip beneath 30 frames per second and the whole thing just runs at 60 on playstation 5. well there is the thing though there is a caveat i said perfect and that's not entirely true because there's actually a couple issues here uh there's still this checkpoint stutter which seems to occur on every version of the game so every time you hit a checkpoint the game just sort of seizes up for a moment that's annoying for sure the game will have to be updated to fix that if it's possible at all then the other thing at least in my case uh i noticed when using the aim down sights feature on the game the the depth of field blur was slightly broken where it was like the upper left portion of the screen wasn't receiving depth of field while the bottom right kind of corner and edges were so it looked weird and i also spotted a few random like red rectangles but i'd seen that before when i first covered the game on occasion so i think it was like a continuation of that glitch but still aside from that it's it's very stable yeah yeah i mean it is impressive stuff but you're like that the checkpoint starter is quite obnoxious but the actual gameplay once you're in the thick of it just plays out beautifully and again you know i can only wish that uh the frame rate limit was removed on the other modes because i suspect that the playstation 5 would ace it fingers crossed that crytek will be producing a patch for this one because i'd love to see it yeah we're going to pivot now to another traditional digital foundry benchmark test which is hitman the original on playstation 4 pro here 1440p resolution but the paris stage here it runs with well traditionally we've kind of suspected it was a cpu limitation our tests on xbox series x suggests there may well be some gpu issues as well but regardless you're seeing the footage playing out here it's anything from you know the low to mid 30s upwards on playstation 4 pro and again playstation 5 locked 60 frames per second it just keeps happening over and over again and i love it you just load up these games like i wonder how it's gonna run lock 60. i mean it's not the most exciting in terms of talking about the the play-by-play here but it's awesome like it's great to see this i guess the only thing here is that uh when you tested this on series x i think the xbox version supports native 4k and that did show some dips whereas on ps4 pro it was capped at 1440p in the high end to be fair though i i would rather take a lock 60 with a lower resolution over a higher resolution with some dips but i was hoping we could have done a like for like comparison here with this game and it's proving more difficult than expected because there was a lot of variation in resolution between one x and pro yeah it's very rare that you actually find a game that runs with an unlocked frame rate on both systems at the same resolution and certainly on the xbox side while we were doing our tests we only had a set amount of games that we could actually test they're all unlocked now but yeah back in the day that was the limit there but uh going back to hitman for a minute there john i think it's worth pointing out that actually the 4k 60 mode that we've got here actually runs mostly at 4k 60. there are only occasional dips certainly in the paris section here and of course hitman allows you to choose between a 2160p mode and 1440p so you can match ps4 pro slash ps5 here and obviously works just the same locked 60 frames per second but regardless we'll talk about this in a bit because there is a fundamental difference between series x and um playstation 5 which is that you know playstation 5 can only tap into the ps4 and the ps4 pro modes so you know a game that ran at 4k on xbox one x will run at 4k on series x whereas on playstation 5 it can only operate at the same resolution as the pro version so yeah hitman is a classic casing point here where it actually runs at 4k on the series x and it runs at 1440p so yeah this is very definitely still mostly a test biased towards cpu analysis and you know as expected playstation 5 aces it's just just fantastic stuff and another game we've we had to test okay okay richard we we got to talk about this next one this was actually the first game that i tested because people love to joke on it but i i like knack i actually think it's a fun game especially the sequel and it's also a game where uh famously it's never quite run properly they opted to leave the framerate uncapped and that always drove me crazy uh the ps4 pro got a patch and in the 1080p mode it actually got reasonably close but there was a high-res mode 1728p which was just it was not smooth at all on the ps4 pro but thankfully now that we've reached seven years later the new console's out we can play it in this high resolution mode and for the first time it's locked 60 frames per second in knack you must be in heaven john this is great like i'm seriously like okay i'm gonna play this for real because like uh i think it's a fun little game and yeah seeing this run in high res at a lock 60 like this uh wow it's it's funny because it's it's just it's one of those games that's kind of like occupied a space in my head for some reason maybe it shouldn't have but it has but here it is and i'm really happy with the results i love it too uh perhaps for a very different reason uh which is that um if you consider the teraflop differential between playstation 5 and ps4 pro 10.3 versus 4.2 thereabouts you've basically got a 2.45 x multiplier in gpu performance moving from one generation to the next and knack funnily enough actually is the game that shows that better than any other title because in the high resolution mode 1728 p you can actually drop beneath 30 frames per second um i think the lowest i actually saw it comes up here in in the uh the frame rate test is about 27 but um i think elsewhere i've actually seen it drop as low as 24 on the pro but again this is a recurring theme it just does not shift from 60 frames per second on playstation 5. it's just flawless it's brilliant it really is uh yeah it's a game changer for this and this also applies to the much smoother but still not perfect neck to so you can play knack at a full 60 fps it's great one of the other games i tested early on because so you tested this on the series x originally it's the evil within two i'm a big fan of this game like i really love this game and on both consoles you know the the default was targeting 30 frames per second but they did add in this sort of unlocked frame rate mode and the xbox series x running in higher resolution than pro it wasn't enough to actually lock it to 60. i mean it was better a lot better but it just couldn't get there so i was really thrilled to see when i loaded this up i played to the first hour or so into the city ran around there it's basically flawless i mean it's really stable 60 frames per second i still think the game looks great it's got some really cool effects at work and just like neat moments that kind of mess with your like mind i guess you know that's the whole point uh but yeah it just blazes through no problem at all it loads faster it runs like a dream it's just it's it's great like this is this is a fantastic way to play the game now yeah again we're seeing a huge uh multiplier to gpu performance here it is you know two times for for quite a lot of the duration sometimes even higher than that because i did note some spots where it will occasionally very fleetingly drop beneath 30 frames per second on ps4 pro this does not happen on the playstation 5 and it's uh it's glorious but again you know it is a low resolution so there's kind of like two factors here the resolution is lower than series x and the gpu multiplier gen on gen is higher so these two factors combine to give us this this this lot 60. this is really interesting and it's weird because the 1x being what it was has actually caused some issues for some of those games running on series x because the multiplier is lower whereas the ps5 is a larger jump over what ps4 pro was and we're just seeing the benefits left and right here yeah it's remarkable yeah and speaking of remarkable [Music] secular shadows die twice now this was a game that i tested on xbox series x and i was really impressed with it because you did see a transformative boost to performance 1800p 60 frames per second for a fair amount of the of the benchmark sequence but when we got into gameplay 50 to 60 was the actual readout that you'd get for the actual experience of playing it and that's the thing is your tests uh i mean you haven't really had a chance to play this game so they were all fairly early in non-demanding areas i loaded up some other areas on the ps5 and including the intro as well and it's just perfect i mean that's what that's the point here and this is a perfect example of checkerboard rendering 1800p versus native 1800p the visual difference between them is so miniscule but the performance boost is much more significant here as a result like e i played this really on my pc because uh i was really having a hard time getting i couldn't adjust to the unlocked frame rate on the consoles for this game and even on my pc at the time i haven't tested it lately i was still getting weird little stutters and hitches here and there none of that is a problem on ps5 it looks super clean full hdr just just rock solid performance all around it's so good that i'm actually thinking i would like them to re-release a pre-patched version of this game on a disc because i would buy that in a second yeah i mean it is remarkable i would say that this is one of the more successful checkerboarding implementations i mean there are a lot of good ones out there but this one it's really difficult to tell the difference between the playstation 4 pro output and the xbox one x output and that pays off in spades on playstation 5. it's just a really phenomenal turnout here and i think we're going to keep the focus on from software games for now because let's take a look at dark souls 3 which again had a really unsatisfactory playstation 4 pro patch which all it really did was unlock the frame rate really nothing more which weirdly enough if we had had the same patch for bloodborne we'd be in a much better position with that game as well i mean you did the capture here for dark souls 3 running on playstation 5. again it doesn't budge it's 60 frames per second throughout but you know you're a fan of these games what does this actually mean for the experience so again i actually finished this game on the pc just because i wanted the smooth 60 frames per second i didn't really even have a save handy for this but these games just feel better at a stable frame rate i've felt this way ever since the series came to the pc a stable 30 is acceptable enough but they never even really got there because of the frame pace initiatives and consoles having both this and securo running at a locked 60 frames per second and i mean locked 60 frames per second it makes them like genuinely great versions to play now and yes this one is limited to 1080p which is unfortunate but it still looks good enough i think and just having it at this frame rate it's something we've not had before with these even dark souls 2 when it received the enhanced version for ps4 and xbox one maybe the pro and the one x fixed it but on those original base machines they were not a hundred percent lock 60. so this is one of the first times i think we've ever had this where you can actually go back to one of these classic firm software games play them all the way through uh presumably i haven't actually played all the way through them on the new hardware but i don't see any reason to think it won't be completely locked yeah i mean we are looking at such a huge multiplier in both cpu and gpu performance compared to the base machine let alone the pro it's just inconceivable that it will have issues but with that said i think we do need to address a couple of issues that we did come across i think from my perspective there is the sense that um the testing regime behind backcompat isn't quite as robust as microsoft's and the fact that we haven't tested anything like the thousands of games that were available but we are finding small issues suggests that users might come across some issues uh on their own library of titles i guess the the place to start is is actually people may have seen recently there was some news about some ubisoft games that weren't supported we discovered that they are in fact supported in that they do install and run but there's a warning message that pops up when you try to play it and this happens with a surprising number of games like do maternals on this list you start the game it pops up this little message saying that you may have an issue playing now the thing is is i haven't actually encountered any problems with these games they actually seem to run fine so i'm really not yet certain what these warnings entail and what kind of issues we were going to run into i mean sony has been prudent about this in the past like on playstation 2 ps1 games on ps2 that had issues most of those issues are very very small or just little tiny visual glitches here and there not a huge deal but the games mostly still worked but here i'm not really sure what's going on and and what we should be looking for and whether it'll actually create i mean it could be a problem that crops up way late in the game it may be some weird obscure thing it's really hard to know right now something which we did discover i mean obviously assassin's creed unity we had to go back and test that disc version with the unlocked frame rate it ran gloriously on xbox series x but looking at the footage here something kind of curious is happening it is not locked 60 on playstation 5. even though you know gpu power we're talking 10.3 teraflops versus 1.84 teraflops it's a huge increase in gpu power the cpu we've already established that it's miles better than jaguar and yet we can't lock to 60 frames per second here when we could on xbox series x so yeah i couldn't quite believe that when you told me about it you sent over the footage that we're looking at here and i do have a theory i suspect that the cpu clocks are actually fully enabled you're getting the full cpu performance because you know when you're in the busy outdoor cities we spend a lot of the time at 60 frames per second just like on xbox series x however seems to me that when there's a lot of alpha effects on screen and when there's like close-ups in cutscenes yeah the bokeh depth of field is very heavy in this game notoriously so yeah we actually see a drop in performance that you don't see on series x now i know that uh game developers they have to test their ps4 games on ps5 and they've got a little option on the disc authoring tool that says right you've got to run the gpu at playstation 4 standard clocks it's a little tick box and i suspect that might be what's happening here maybe there's a compatibility issue that means they need to run assassin's creed unity at ps4 base clocks and that wouldn't really be a problem on the actual patched version of the game because you know that's locked to 30 frames per second but here with uh the unpatched version the unlocked version seems to be uh having some issues and the fact that other games like syndicate and other assassins creed 10 gentle titles from ub software on the uh compatibility issue list makes me think that there's something with this engine that sort of pushed them to enable that maybe some sort of compatibility issue we're not seeing and like you said because when the game is fully patched it's not unlocked i'm sure if it was being tested by ubisoft or whoever they would be testing that version not this unlocked patched version so this is one of those weird special cases and i think you're probably right about this gpu thing and it's also worth noting a couple other little details you don't get the automatic 16x anisotropic filtering that you see on the series x so that's a that's a little bit of a miss but not a huge deal overall i found and curiously so this is really interesting is uh it all runs in hdr but it's tone mapped so at series x actually does auto hdr which is like a sort of a a way to compute what the hdr signal would look like from an sdr source and it's really doing some work on it whereas on the ps5 it's always outputting hdr if you're connected to an hdr display and that applies to ps4 games and what i found in that case is that the overall image is actually slightly boosted in brightness like the whites are brighter everything's a little brighter and it actually looks good but it's still like just like tone map so it's a weird thing like i like it but um i wouldn't really say it's real hdr and you can always disable hdr in the in the front and menus right yeah i don't in this case though i actually looks better with it so i wouldn't do that but it is curious um i guess the weird thing there is i found you know if you want to use black frame insertion at 60 hertz and you know that it dims the screen a little bit running with hdr enable it brightens the image just a bit which makes that the impact of brightness from black frame insertion less noticeable so there is kind of a weird side benefit there so yeah i want to talk about some other things related to backwards compatibility because this has come out of nowhere so it's fascinating here because you know on the face of it technically i think microsoft's backwards compatibility solution has been better tested and is better implemented but when you consider the playstation library here what sony is bringing into the party is pretty amazing so you know to explain that from 2013 to 2016 bass playstation 4 games they typically ran at 1080p and a lot of the time the xbox one versions would run at 900p so if you run those 900p games on series x they'll still be 900p whereas you know playstation 5 you're getting the 1080p uh experience so i think that's that's pretty amazing so that's the feather in sony's camp there you know the fact that you're getting typically in the multi-platform scenario the playstation 4 version was better and it's better on playstation 5. then there's the whole enhanced console thing which i find fascinating because the resolution targets were lower typically than xbox series x but thanks to the gpu multiplier that you're getting going from playstation 4 pro to playstation 5 you're getting higher frame rates so we could find the limits of gpu performance on xbox series x under back compat pretty easily but i'm not sure that we found it on playstation 5 running ps4 pro games because you know certainly in the tests that we've got here unlock frame rate games just right at 60 frames per second it's a remarkable turn of events yeah and not only that i mean you know everything still runs great from disc but it's also important to note i tested a lot of disc games and one game you know it can even like solve issues in like we didn't actually we mentioned the evil within two earlier and i just want to quickly mention the first game if you recall that's a game where when it shipped on ps4 it had serious issues the resolution was weird the frame rate was always under 30. closer to 20 sometimes in the teens it was terrible the ps5 you can pop that in your your system don't download the patch and it just works it's locked 30 fps it works correctly everything feels just as it should it's it's a funny thing to see how these games can just they they just feel like they've been fixed somehow yeah i mean it's all good stuff but yeah obviously there's more games that we want to test there's more experiences we want to share but you know that's the big surprise that's the great news the fact that you know there's what over 100 million 110 million playstation 4 owners out there oh yeah you know we had this big unknown as to whether the library would translate across to playstation 5 and if it did whether we would be seeing enhancements the great news is that you know pretty much everything is there it's just been great fun for us you know talking about uh the latest games that we've installed on our ps5s and to see how that transformed running on the new system we didn't even mention uh loading though you know like we don't need to go into the numbers here but that's another thing the loading benefits from running on ps5 uh so that's you know that's a whole different thing to consider faster loading faster frame rates it just feels like all these console games that never quite ran correctly are suddenly exactly what they should have been in the first place yeah and that's just terrific but i think we're going to leave it there much more to share as i said so yeah keep your eyes peeled but that's all from me for now so thanks for joining me on this one john sure is fun and as always please do like and subscribe if you enjoyed the work ring the bell for instant notifications uh whenever digital foundry posts new content and for those that love what we do and want to support the team more directly you can download a huge body of work stretching all the way back to 2016 with pristine video quality and obviously we've got uh stuff like spider-man miles morales available for download 2 which looks absolutely phenomenal but that's all from us for now thanks for making it all the way to the end of this one if indeed you did and just generally thanks for watching and supporting digital foundry

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 1,023,094

Rating: 4.8588257 out of 5

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Id: bKQ6NeTjccA

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/H3000]

Finally! That announced surprise was killing me. So glad back compat is amazing. "Every game we've tested, bar perhaps one, runs with the full power of the PS5. And just like Xbox Series X the effects can be absolutely phenomenal. Transformative to the point that we're blown away."

[u/H3000]

Looks like Just Cause 3 is finally playable.

[u/darksquallz]

Can't wait to play GoT for the first time at 60FPS!

[u/blakeavon]

Damn Richard, my heart sank in that moment... well played!

[u/ChrisRR]

Even DF are gushing about it. They're pretty difficult to please

[u/JSol1996]

I hope John tests Lichdom: Battlemage through ps5 backwards compatibility simply for the memes.

[u/kryten2k35]

I've been waiting for this. I'll likely spend the first 12 months of my PS5 ownership replaying PS4 titles in 60FPS

[u/WalterRyan]

It's another example that just because Sony is quiet about something doesn't mean it's bad and they want to hide it. They just let the experience speak for itself.

[u/Seritias]

I'm just glad all of this works so well, as it looks now, both consoles this gen just seem like genuinely great machines. It's simply a great time to be a console gamer