New PS5 Firmware Update Appears to Fix VRR Stuttering Issues 1
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Tech experts Digital Foundry recently ran a big expose on PlayStation’s VRR support, affecting both PS5 Pro and PS5. While we’d encourage you to read the article in its entirety, for the purposes of brevity we’ll summarise.

VRR, or Variable Refresh Rate, is a feature which in essence gives the appearance of games running smoother. While historically you’d get the smoothest performance from titles being locked to 30fps or 60fps, working in conjunction with the refresh rate of your display, VRR allows the system itself to control your television’s refresh rate.

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This means that games don’t necessarily have to run at a locked frame rate to appear “smooth”, and can instead operate within a variable window, like 50-60fps or 100-120fps. Where this would result in inconsistencies or stutters without VRR, they’re eradicated with this feature enabled.

However, there’s been a persistent bug with the PS5’s solution which has caused micro-stutters to occur over time. While many theories exist as to why this has been occurring, ultimately the end result has been a sub-par experience for a feature that’s supposed to theoretically improve performance.

But with this week’s PS5 firmware update, which mentioned improvements to “usability on some screens”, it seems the problem is fixed.

While we still need to wait for more in-depth testing, hands-on impressions across forums like ResetEra and Reddit reveal that VRR is now working as intended, without any stutters or issues that were present before.

So, it’s unclear exactly why this occurred, but the fact that Sony appears to have fixed it after extensive reporting is positive.