Sony will finally add much-awaited variable refresh rate (VRR) to PlayStation 5 consoles in the near future.
Communicated via a blog post, Sony confirmed VRR should be coming in the months ahead. How many months exactly is anyone’s guess. We just hope it’s not too far away, but more importantly, with no more delays.
So, what is VRR? Why should you care about it? And how to enable it?
First things first. VRR, as its name implies, is a variable throughput of images per second that get sent to the screen. In normal circumstances, the monitor or TV will only refresh its panel at a fixed rate – for example, 60Hz, 120Hz or 144Hz, causing image tearing if, let’s say, the graphics card sends an image in the middle of a refresh cycle when the monitor is still showing a previous frame, resulting in two images overlapping.
Using VRR, the panel is synced to the output/source speed ensuring clean/no overlapping images. Present for some years now on PCs, it’s finally been added to this generation of consoles, including Xbox series S/X and PS5.
As for how to enable it. First, you will need a FreeSync-compatible monitor or TV that uses HDMI 2.1 – for example, AOC’s Agon Pro AG324UX or LG’s OLED48C1. Then, like in the image above, you just have to go into your console’s video output options and see if the setting is active. A similar option should be available on your display.
Activating VRR ought to take some pressure off the GPU and developers insofar as they don’t need to tune to a specific refresh rate. VRR should enable higher resolutions to be supported more often, too, as smooth adaptive synchronisation works well at lower refresh rates in the 30-50Hz range.
