over the last few months an issue has been simmering in the background on PlayStation consoles vrr is not working apparently well we've done the investigation ourselves and specifically Oliver McKenzie is joining me here who's done a bulk of the work so Oliver what is this issue with vrr on PlayStation consoles yes Alex this has been a persistent issue that we've been getting reports of for the last few months I would say since about December of last year so basically there is a persistent stuttering problem with vrr on PS5 and PS5 Pro as documented by users and we've been able to replicate that behavior ourselves over the past few days so basically the first game I tested here is The Last of Us Part Two on a Samsung qn 90d so that's a pretty decent uh mini LED panel and I was actually able to replicate the issue pretty easily on PS5 Pro so the key thing here is it doesn't usually emerge within the first 20 minutes of play but with t part 2 running at 120 HZ output with vrr in PR mode unlocked so with a variable frame rate there the issue is very obvious now if you look at my Last of Us Part Two footage here you should be able to spot a very slight stutter about every 8 seconds and I've put a little timeline in the corner of the screen there and every little blue marker that you see corresponds to a stutter so hopefully you can anticipate those issues and even over YouTube you should hopefully be able to spot them because I think they're fairly obvious here so it continues endlessly in this sort of periodic cycle where every eight seconds or so it just happens again and again and again and it it occurs curiously like almost exactly every 8 seconds sometimes it's exactly 8 seconds sometimes it's like plus or minus maybe 10 or 15 frames or so at 60 FPS so it can vary slightly but those stutters are very often accompanied by 120 HZ reading which is the same you would get if a game fell out of the VR range completely or is using a technique like LFC to hit 120 HZ output there but I don't think the Samsung my Samsung is reporting the refresh rate of every single frame here because sometimes it happens when there's stutter sometimes it doesn't and it's clearly not varying enough that it's showing off every single frame time it's kind of showing off maybe one in every five frame times there I suspect in that panel so The Last of Us Part Two is actually a really great game to test out a bunch of hypothesis I had about this problem because if I booted the game up and let it run for about 20 minutes with VR on but without unlocking the frame rate the game was fine so it was totally fine but when I had the game running unlocked and I had the issue emerge and then I turned the FPS lock back on it retained the stuttering Behavior so to see this issue it looks like you really need to have that variable frame rate going on for some period there and then after that point you start to see the stuttering issue um I booted up Elden ring next very popular game very unlocked game to our shrin uh to see if I could replicate the issue at 60 HZ output with VR and it seems like if game doesn't have explicit vrr support necessarily but does have a generally unstable frame rate here you should be able to see the stutter so here I was able to see the stutter and hopefully you see that little timeline there about every 8 seconds I'm seeing that stutter again but I would also say that with some of these games you will be able to notice slight moment to moment frame time variance because of VR because you are running with an unlocked frame rate with VR you should be able to see a little bit of frame rate perturbations but it's those kind of clear stutters those clear Jagged stutters stutters but you should be able to notice in most titles again recurring about every 8 seconds so I ended up testing a ton of games here here 19 games which is very time consuming as you can imagine because you have to wait 20 minutes 30 minutes before you actually start testing each one so it took me quite a while but uh these are the games that seem to suffer from the issue in my experience so you have The Last of Us titles Last of Us Part Two Last of Us Part One Diablo 4 Hogwarts Legacy Elder ring Resident Evil 4 ratchet Clank Rift depart Mar Marvel Spider-Man remastered metaphor ref Fantasia um and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and these games they set are on PS5 as well in my testing but I also did test briefly just to dispel any concerns or myths here I did test out Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on series X and it doesn't suffer from any stuttering issues it runs perfectly fine with an unlocked frame rate in like the 60 to 80 FPS range just like PS5 but without the stutting problem I also believe this issue though I have not tested it out too much myself that it should occur broadly across different panel types different televisions different mon monitors we've personally tested it across different kinds of sets I've tested it obviously on my Q90 and it should occur on all kinds of different panels here so Alex what do you make of kind of those early excursions into this problem in those particular titles there's a lot to be said here it occurs across such a breadth of and variety of titles that it seems a platform Universal to a large degree um so it doesn't seem to be only limited to 120 HZ output necessarily um it also apparently only occurs after 20 to 30 odd minutes and I did not uh run a timer to exactly see how long it takes um but usually when things creep in over a slow amount of period of time I think about issues I've seen on PC before where there is some uh mismatch of refresh rates or mismatch of an expected number over a period of time uh there was a bug last year in the Nvidia driver where where vsync would be set and over a period of I think it was roughly 60 seconds or so vsync would degrade to like 59 to 58 FPS after about 60 seconds or so of play almost like it was expecting a different refresh rate uh that was slowly counting down or something over time and I've also seen it in games before um with memory leaks this is probably not a memory leak related issue where over a certain amount of time you can start seeing performance degradations and things like that um here I mean it is really hard to guess exactly what could be causing this uh some thing that one has to consider is that uh a console like the PlayStation 5 doesn't actually run at 120 hertz it runs at ntsc 11 19.88 Herz if if there was some sort of different expectations between the the set and the the game count and the game over a certain period of time this rounding error could cause issues uh you know but the numbers are strange exactly every 8 seconds roughly plus or minus a few frames that is that is definitely not good but um your implication of having tested so many games not all games are affected right that's correct that's correct uh there are some games that don't have the stuttering Behavior which is another kind of wrinkle in this Little Mix that is a little bit confusing here um but this includes some games that do have unlocked frame rates so in my testing it tested out a bunch of games with unlocked frame rates and God of War Ragnarok Gran Turismo 7 Immortals of AVM Dragon Dogma 2 don't appear to exhibit this issue I did test this pretty thoroughly in these titles and in my testing they were fine I thought some of the issues might be related to the game engine but it's not totally clear that it is like in Dragon Dogma 2 for instance um that title has no issues right and that's what putting on re engine but Resident Evil 4 does appear to have issues um now I have to provide certain caveats here and I'll provide a number of caveats because these problems tend to emerge over time I was usually testing with like 30 minutes or an hour or so of the game running um sometimes longer than that but it's Pro it's possible that some of these problems May emerge in these games over even longer periods that I didn't necessarily have time to test um So based on my sample here I think the majority of prominent games at least with unlocked frame rates appear to have this issue but I would re itate that like one thing that you can be pretty sure won't cause an issue is a if a game presents a pretty consistent frame rate output so in a game like alen wake 2 or the recent Assassin's Creed Shadows or really the majority of PS5 Pro and PS5 software um you should be getting get pretty consistent 60 FPS or 120 FPS or 40 FPS or 30 FPS or whatever even with vrr enabled there um I don't think you'll have issues in those titles in general even if they have LFC or another technology to accommodate vrr I don't think you'll generally have issues if those ttles are staying pretty much locked in my experience they shouldn't have issues now you know again I put caveat if you're playing for a longer period and maybe there are some frame rate WBLS um I don't really see anything that would preclude this issue happening there's nothing like conceptually that separates the title that's like unlocked and locked it with certain dips so maybe that would introduce some timing issue over time but I'd also provide the final caveat here this issue is kind of hard to track down completely and there were some games like Spider-Man 2 for instance that had inconsistent enough frame times with vrr enabled um I think probably because of some CPU limitation or something like that where it was hard to tell if the game had the issue or not or if it was just its native kind of fundamental frame time instability especially in the open world and Spider-Man you tend to notice some of those train of inconsistencies even with VR enabled there um so it's just kind of hard to tell based on visual input in some games but I'm fairly confident that like you know on the order at least of 70% maybe 80% of titles that I tested should have some of these issues in titles um that do have unlocked frame rate modes but Alex I think you've also tested this issue so could you explain were you able to replicate this issue and kind of what was your experience with this actual stuttering Behavior yeah so um I'm testing the game on LG Ultra gear 32 in dual mode OLED 480 240 HZ monitor 4K 1080 it's very sweet monitor um and I was running through to my 2.1 one thing I was making sure and that I think we should clarify we are not letting the council sleep or anything like that and waking from sleep um this is just the game running um I played through uh the beginning of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 didn't happen in the initial area then I got to the second area after you kind of go picnicking with your friends by the lake uh and then that's when I started noting it it was rough roughly around 20 25 minutes into the game I believe and at this point in time just spinning the C camera the frame rate was around I turned off motion blur on purpose was around 60 to 65 to 70 FPS depending upon what I was looking at uh but just while turning the camera the frame time should be smooth and they were smooth previously because I kept spinning the camera and over and over again and then it started to creep in and it was really obvious and I started being able to count with my breath you know under my breath eight seconds out and it then would happen now an interesting behavior that I recorded uh was that if I um that's me plug it into like HDMI1 of my panel if I switched back to HDMI 2 which was a PC and I switched back to HDMI 1 the behavior would reset itself it would go away and then I'd keep spinning the camera and then 20 25 aom minutes later it would start happening again so that's a system level thing on the PlayStation 5 when it detects an uh when it text detects input and loses input so I'm pretty sure input was being lost while the time I was switching over to a different input on my monitor and then input is returned again when I bring it back online and at that point in time it would kind of like reset this timer I would imagine that is causing this issue uh so seems like changing the input on your television could potentially be a way to get rid of the issue momentarily but it isn't very great because you're switching the input on your television you know every couple minutes you could probably turn it on and off again uh maybe it would do the same thing um but uh for me uh this is an OLED monitor uh you have an LCD right um Tom tested also on a monitor yours is television mine is not a television um you know it seems broadly Universal to anything that supports um you know the vrr standard the HTMI vrr standard at least um obviously one thing we did not check it out on was older freesync panels uh that potentially could have gotten support at some point by Sony but I I don't think that's something we most people would be running these days anyway um but yeah so it's it's really bizarre it definitely gets in the way of playability a whole bunch it is less smooth presentation than vrr should be it is a less smooth presentation the basic vsync uh and uh if people don't know it sounds like like we're maybe nitpicking but when you see a frame being held longer than it should be routinely every you know 8 seconds or so uh it is extremely grading uh it's uh you know like Myro car back in the day launched with the 59 FPS frame rate and we were like this is awful this is not as bad as that but this is still extremely distracting uh cuz that length of that frame time is actually pretty long uh it is a shame that we don't have a very good way to to measure vrr frame times but it is actually pretty long on my display I don't have like you one that measures the exact frame time or refresh rate every single refresh mine actually seems like a rolling average of the the previous 120 or so so it in that aspect uh I only would see just like a slightly uh lower frame rate in that one moment when I would say it but that's the problem with averages uh so they don't show the in the moment actual fluidity of something uh but in general not very good and if I were to just really quickly once again guess what is happening maybe there are Universal libraries provided by Sony to implement things like vrr and uh maybe even low frame rate compensation um maybe not uh but if there was something wrong with one of those tied to a a system platform update uh maybe that could have been causing this issue but I guess the worst thing would it be would be that uh it is actually something that was shipped with the game and then requires a game patch update that is the situation you would potentially really not want to see because it would then be completely up to the developer whether or not they can update these things um so hopefully whatever the issue is it's actually something systemwide that can be um packaged together with a PS5 system update yeah yeah I hope that's not the case and especially like I mean I was testing some games that were of an older vintage and some games that were of a newer vintage some games that had been patched like in the past week and other games that haven't been patched since before the PS5 Pro came out I was observing the same issue so hopefully it's on the K system Library side hopefully it's any can update but yeah I would totally agree with Alex I think this is a really big issue in affected titles it's really bad obtrusive and obvious stuttering in my experience and it kind of defe the point of vrr like the stutters are so noticeable and highly distracting and that's the exact thing you're trying to avoid with vrr here um so if you are playing games on PS5 or PS5 Pro for extended periods it could show up and like Alex said one way you can kind of avoid this issue is to switch inputs or restart the game or do something else to kind of reset that timer and give you an extra 20 minutes of stutter-free gameplay you know not ideal there uh but yeah the only way to really avoid this issue completely is to disable VR and play your game without it um that's probably what I would do for a lot of games so whatever issues occurring here Sony needs to fix it fairly urgently I would say a lot of people have VR panels these days probably a lot of people have VR enabled in their panels enabled on the PS5 and even applying to the games that don't necessarily support vrr right having that toggle on you as well so it's going to kick in automatically and in a lot of games they have unlocked frame rate modes that will kick in without any user input right so in a title like The Last of Us Part One or part two many other titles the Uncharted games you'll get a little toggle right and that's a great way to you know give yourself an unlock frame rate experience with a little bit more inconsistency or a lock frame rate experience that might you know give you some VR benefit if it's dipping there but in a title like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 or Diablo 4 those are games that if you have a VR panel connected and you have VR enabled you're going to get an unlocked trate experience on PS5 or PS5 Pro there um so that's not ideal because you're going to get a substandard experience kind of no matter what you do unless you turn VR off that's the only solution there so yeah ultimately I would say this is a big issue um in my own personal testing I mean at DF we mostly test with vsync on obviously uh because of capture limitations because we want to show you guys a good presentation for the game a good frame presentation for the game and when I was testing VR you know I wasn't leaving on for really extended periods there when I do play with vrr I tend to play games without the unlocked toggles on because I tend to just prefer a locked lower refresh to an unlocked Higher One unless the unlocked Higher One is a lot higher but this is for sure a big issue for gamers who are playing unlock frame rate games or in general who are playing games on PS5 or PS5 Pro like you need to be aware of this and you probably need to you know in a lot of cases avoid vrr unless uh until Sony patches this issue hopefully they can patch this issue at some point in the near future but uh I think that probably wraps it up for us unless you had anything else to say Alex no it's definitely not not a good situation and let's see maybe there's some traction on the Sony side of things or maybe even some developer respones to see if they're also seeing this too that always helps uh but until then I guess that's the end of this video so Oliver thank you for doing the bulk of the workload here we're very grateful yeah no problem Alex it a fun as always and if you did like this video please hit that like button subscribe to the channel help us out on patreon follow on social media and as always this is Alex and Oliver saying