Sony appears to now be working on a special frame rate compensation feature, according to the company's latest patent listing. With high-frame rate gaming becoming increasingly more commonplace, technologies such as FreeSync have been developed to combat screen tearing in varying ways, though the presence of multiple standards can complicate things for the average user.
It was only recently that Sony added variable refresh rate, or VRR, support to PlayStation 5 on all supported displays. This feature dynamically syncs the television or monitor's refresh rate to the console's frame rate output, which can greatly alleviate screen tearing and improve gameplay smoothness across the board. Now, however, Sony may be looking to improve its frame rate technology stack even further still.
According to a new patent filing from Sony, PlayStation 5's VRR support could be due for an upgrade sometime down the line. One of the company's latest patent applications describes a special frame rate compensation system that leverages scanouts to smooth out any potential frame dips in taxing gameplay sections. The process includes scanning out the GPU's rendered frames and compensating for fluctuations from the desired target frame rate. And since the described process uses frame buffers to accomplish this job, it's not entirely dissimilar to Nvidia's proprietary G-Sync monitor technology, for example.
In some instances, as the patent describes, the entire frame scanout and compensation process could even be offloaded to a dedicated coprocessor of some sort, which could tie in with Sony's recent multi-GPU hardware patent. Of course, the two listings describe different use cases and situations, but it's unlikely that Sony's engineers aren't thinking ahead and wondering if these technological solutions could work hand-in-hand.
Tech-minded gamers will know that, much as is the case with the recent browser-based cloud gaming patent from Sony, input latency could be an issue that Sony might need to grapple with. Namely, the described scanout compensation system is basically nested between multiple frame buffer instances, meaning that it's may add more latency to a game that may already be struggling to run properly in the first place.
That being said, rumors suggest that Sony may ship 30 million PS5s in 2023, and the company is unlikely to upgrade its flagship console with a faulty frame compensation feature. If and when anything comes of this particular patent, odds are good that any potential latency concerns will have already been smoothed out. The obvious issue, however, is that this might not happen for another couple of years of course.