Digital Foundry Specialist Richard Leadbetter has released a technical review 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 some unknown way to recognize what is functioning on the PS5. This, in turn, removes the frame rate limitation.

Until recently, it was assumed that in order 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: the updated Ratchet & Clank is based on the old one (according to Ledbetter, he already “some years”) SDK, which could open the way for a similar upgrade for other PS4 projects.

Modder Lance McDonald commented on Ledbetter’s discovery on his microblog: “The obvious intermediate conclusion here: Bloodborne could theoretically be officially made to run at 60fps (not 4K, this would require the PS4 Pro SDK) 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.