Bloodborne fans have been begging for a game update since Sony’s most powerful PlayStation 4 Pro was unveiled in 2016. But those fans have had no relief, not even on the PlayStation 5, where Bloodborne works the same as it did on the original PlayStation 4. Modders started to fix unofficial support for refresh rates of 60 frames per second, and now the Digital Foundry folks have taken it a step further by taking Bloodborne a makeover in 4K.
Digital Foundry has achieved this with the help of an AI image upscaling tool called Video Enhance AI from Topaz Labs, processing pre-recorded images with 1080p resolution up to 4K resolution. It’s not perfect, and as Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter and John Linneman point out, a lot of it has to do with Bloodbornethe “distinct visual peculiarities”. The game’s anti-aliasing, chromatic aberration and specular aliasing create a “noisy image”, explains Digital Foundry, visual peculiarities that AI upscaling models may not know how to handle.
The result looks good, perhaps in exceptionally smooth parts. It’s not exactly Yoda’s Smooth levels of strangeness, but some of the grain and detail seems to be lost during the increase in resolution. Still, it’s probably as close as we’ll get to seeing Bloodborne rendered at 4K / 60 fps, as Sony and FromSoftware seem unwilling to take on the task alone, six years after the game started.