Rocket League developer says 120fps is harder to reach on PS5 than Xbox Series X/S

As it stands, only a handful of games support 120fps on the newly released PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

However, more games run at the higher frame rate on Microsoft’s consoles, and now, we may have a better idea of why that’s actually the case.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Rocket League developer Psyonix noted that the process to enable 120fps has is more complicated than it is on the Xbox Series X/S.

Enabling 120Hz on Xbox Series X|S is a minor patch, but enabling it on PS5 requires a full native port due to how backwards compatibility is implemented on the console, and unfortunately wasn’t possible due to our focus elsewhere,” the developer said in a statement to Eurogamer.

This would explain why PS4 games that are running on PS5 via backwards compatibility like Rocket League or Call of Duty: Warzone don’t support 120fps, while they do on Xbox Series X/S. Of course, this only appears to be an issue with backwards compatibility; games which were developed specifically for PS5 or have designated PS5 versions, like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition and Dirt 5 all support 120fps on the console.

Eurogamer spoke to Digital Foundry‘s Richard Leadbetter about the issue.

“120Hz support has indeed been a feature for Xbox for some years now, though Rainbow Six Siege was the only game that actually exceeded 60 frames per second,” Leadbetter said. “The strategy from Microsoft was always to implement features like this and VRR (variable refresh rate) ahead of time so display manufacturers had target hardware to work with, mostly so the foundations would be in place for next-gen games.”

He concluded that the “ball is in Sony’s court,” although he questioned whether the work required to enable 120fps gameplay in PS4 games on PS5 wouldn’t be better spent on actual PS5 games.

Image credit: Psyonix

Source: Eurogamer