Bloodborne is one of the most celebrated exclusive platforms for the PlayStation 4, but similar to the original Demon’s Souls for PS3, there is a sense that the series’ momentum has waned, despite huge critical acclaim. There was never a sequel to the game, and not even a PlayStation 4 Pro update was delivered. At the here and now, if you play Bloodborne on PlayStation 5, you’ll experience 1080p at an unstable 30 frames per second, which is barely improved over the original PS4. However, today we can show how the game seems to run at 60fps via backward compatibility, along with an additional AI upscaling pass taking the action up to 4K. Simply put, you took to see this.
The story behind the video is actually a kind of saga. In May 2020, Digital Foundry presented an unofficial unlocked fps patch for Bloodborne, encoded by Lance McDonald. McDonald took advantage of changes to the Dark Souls 3 PS4 Pro patch code that allowed for an unlocked frame-rate, bringing them to Bloodborne and essentially allowing the game to run at 60fps. But the problem was that the game was never designed to run on PS4 Pro, it couldn’t take full advantage of the machine’s power – boost mode was as far as you could. A blocked 1080p60 was out of the question, while even 720p60 had problems, presumably because having removed the GPU bottleneck, CPU limitations became the problem. The McDonald’s patch was released publicly some time ago and can be run on the development PS4 hardware and on exploited retail machines.
Bloodborne’s unlocked fps patch while running on the PS5 back-compat … with an extra AI upscaling pass for a 4K presentation!
A few weeks ago, we received images from someone who we understand took the corrected version of Bloodborne’s McDonald’s and somehow managed to get it running on what we might assume to be PlayStation 5 development hardware. In fact, we didn’t see the console running the game, but there are two definite evidences in the capture that we have that confirm that it is actually running on the new Sony console. Firstly, the trophy notifications are PS5-style, while performance is essentially a 60 frames per second shot from start to finish in 1080p with just the occasional missed frame – something we’ve never seen before. This was legit, it was in fact Bloodborne running faster and smoother than ever and it looked great, but we wanted more.
Regular readers and viewers of Digital Foundry may have noticed that we are excited about the arrival of AI techniques in games and we use AI for everything from YouTube thumbnails to restoring old development images in our colossal Final Fantasy 7 retrospective, so for not to see if we can deliver the complete Bloodborne update package? With 1080p60 video in the bag, why not shoot in 4K too? So he started a week of experiments using a tool called Topaz Video Enhance AI, which uses a number of different AI upscaling models – and it turned out that most of them could provide considerably higher details.
However, these AI upscaling techniques also served to emphasize some of Bloodborne’s graphical problems: poor anti-aliasing with obvious brilliance, alongside some specular aliasing in the Unreal Engine 3 style. We established a model that could solve most problems specular and reduce AA artifacts, but in some scenarios it would lose some details – the image gallery above shows all the advantages and disadvantages of this scaling up process. The overall result with this model has some similarities with TAA, interestingly – raw and untreated pixels are well treated, but they may appear to be over-processed from time to time (very stylized, even?), But there is much more stability in motion. What I found fascinating was that almost all of the AI upscaling models I tested were able to recognize UI text and scale it in a way that looked virtually as good as native resolution rendering.
The processing of each image took about 0.5 to 0.6 seconds per frame using an RTX 3090, so hopefully Topaz Labs will become familiar with Nvidia’s tensor cores at some point for a less prolonged experience. That said, playing the output video at the end of the long process was great – it was great to see the game at a higher perceived resolution than before. A suitable Bloodborne patch would probably look quite different from this one, but it is an interesting insight into how the game could run on the next generation (current generation?) Hardware.
How Lance McDonald Bloodborne’s unlocked fps patch works on a PlayStation 4 Pro.
All of this leads to some obvious questions. There’s money at stake for Sony to bring Bloodborne to the PlayStation 5, so why haven’t we seen an update? After all, if Lance McDonald is able to fix the game for higher frame rates, why can’t Sony? The truth is that there are a number of logistical, technical and perhaps even corporate challenges here. First, if the Lance patch were released as an official update, the frame-rate would be unlocked on all systems – not just on PlayStation 5. Based on our experiences with the patch seen on PS4 and PS4 Pro, that would make it the game a worse experience overall. Getting the game to recognize that it is running on PS5 and removing only the fps limit would likely require the entire project to be reassembled and updated to operate on the latest cross-generation SDK. It is possible, but it is certainly not easy for a game that turned six yesterday. It is likely that the code base has not been changed for some time.
Perhaps the way forward is for Sony to renew the franchise exactly the way it did with Demon’s Souls – handing over the code and original assets to a talented development studio like Bluepoint Games and rebuilding, remastering or remaking the game specifically for PlayStation 5. simple undertaking, it would take years to deliver, but the end result would certainly be worth it. In the here and now, the McDonald’s patch running on PS5 with video captures enhanced with our AI enhancement is the best we can get – but we can’t help thinking that this is not the end of Bloodborne’s story.