DF Weekly: PS5 exploit opens the door to new PS4 60fps upgrades

Perhaps inevitably, Digital Foundry Direct Weekly returns once again with a new episode and it’s fair to say that we have an exceptional line-up of topics and supporter questions this week. We’ve already posted an article about path-traced lighting coming to Skyrim, but what stood out to me this week was news about the discovery of a new exploit for PlayStation 5 – and it’s already delivering 60fps upgrades for PS4 titles that never received any kind of official patch.

Console exploits aren’t talked about much because of their piracy-adjacent nature, but the scale and scope of the ‘PS5 Hack’ is limited by a number of factors, not least that the exploits have already been patched by Sony. To use an exploit on the PS5 means you can’t run any new games and you can’t go online. It then becomes more of a technical curiosity, and one of those curiosities is that a range of frame-rate unlocking patches that only work on exploited PS4 and PS4 Pro consoles can now be adapted to run on PlayStation 5, with most of the patching work being carried out by an individual known as Illusion.

Their YouTube channel is a treasure trove of data, showing a range of games previously locked to 30fps running unlocked – and it’s interesting that it’s rare to see too many titles delivering that much of a performance upgrade once the 30fps cap is removed. Red Dead Redemption 2, DriveClub, Batman Arkham Knight… these and many others have been patched, but whether it’s CPU or GPU limitations, 60fps is understandably elusive. Illusion even has 720p resolution patches for some PS4 games, which highlight that even if the GPU were stronger, the lacklustre Jaguar CPU cores would still be problematic in sustaining 60 frames per second.

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