Variable Refresh Rate Coming To PlayStation This Week

Sony today announced a brand new feature for the PlayStation 5. Within days the long-awaited Variable Resfresh Rate (VRR), will arrive. Only a few games in the future will have the ability to support this feature.

In a blog post today, Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experience at PlayStation, introduced VRR and described the basics of how it works. “On HDMI 2.1 VRR-compatible TVs and PC monitors, VRR dynamically syncs the refresh rate of the display to the PS5 console’s graphical output. Nishino states that VRR enhances PS5’s visual performance by minimising or eliminating screen tearing, frame pacing issues, and screen tearing. The games will look cleaner overall. It can also lower input latency.

You will need an HDMI 2.1 cable and a VRR compatible monitor to use the feature. This feature will work on many gaming TVs and monitors using AMD’s Freesync technology, which is their term for VRR. Make sure you have this capability enabled before you enable Variable Refresh Rate in PlayStation 5.

There are many PlayStation 5 titles that will use VRR soon. A PlayStation Blog post gave a breakdown of the games which we can expect VRR support to be available in the following weeks.

A variable refresh rate can be a huge deal for games which can’t achieve a constant framerate. This is especially true for games where 60 frames per second seems possible. This can help with jitters and hitches in inconsistent games. It even makes it seem like your framerate is higher than it actually is. VRR is most useful in games where there are performance issues due to high resolutions, shadows and raytraced lighting. VRR is already implemented on the Xbox Series X and S and makes a big difference there, so I’m excited to see it working with games like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Godfall, two games whose framerates suffer in higher-fidelity modes.

Do you wish to see which games receive VRR support via PS5 Comment below to let us know!