FromSoftware's Maddening 30 FPS Stutter Fixed In Unofficial PlayStation Patch But There's A Caveat
Well, if you have played a FromSoftware game in the last decade, you might have noticed that it wasn't very smooth. It's not something the average gamer is likely to pick up on, but if you're someone who is sensitive enough to smoothness that you shop for monitors on the merits of their response times, you will be able to tell that FromSoftware's games exhibit a strange sort of stuttering behavior in certain circumstances.
What's actually happening here is a phenomenon we call micro-stutter. It's also often called a "frame pacing" problem. Essentially, the game's frame delivery to the machine's output subsystems gets out of sync with screen refreshes, resulting in a sort of "stutter-step" movement as every other frame takes twice as long. It's most visible when moving the camera, and it's not the result of insufficient GPU power; it's not a "real" stutter.
To be clear, while this is technically a problem on every platform, it's much more noticeable on the company's console releases that employ a 30 FPS cap. Sticking a 33ms frame in between 16.7ms frames doesn't look great, but it's not as bad as when the game is capped at 30 FPS. That's because a drop to half-framerate at 30 FPS means that you have two frames almost 67ms apart—a long enough gap to visibly interrupt fluidity.
Well, old mate Rich Leadbetter over at Digital Foundry put the patches to the test and found that, yes, indeed, Illusion's patches do fix up the frame-pacing foibles in FromSoftware's titles, allowing them to deliver a perfectly smooth 30 FPS in the affected games. He also found a curious consequence of the way the patches work, though: grotesque input lag.
Testing using Bloodborne and Elden Ring, recording his gameplay and his hands with high-speed cameras, he found that Bloodborne suffered an extra 78 ms of input lag on average, while the open-world Elden Ring suffered an extra 50 ms—with the caveat that its unmodified presentation is already laggier than Bloodborne's. Ultimately, both patches make their respective games much more difficult to play as a result of the extra input latency, but some people may actually prefer the lag over the inconsistent frame delivery.
While the other games are unlikely to ever be patched, Elden Ring is expected to get a significant engine update eventually, adding ray-traced lighting and possibly other effects. Such an update may come along with the mentioned-but-not-announced DLC that will surely come along sooner than later. If so, perhaps FromSoftware can devote some attention to fixing up its frame pacing without sacrificing responsiveness.
