Sony Hoping to Minimize Frame Rate Dips with New Patent

gamerant.com:

Sony appears to now be working on a special frame rate compensation feature, according to the company's latest patent listing. With high-frame rate gaming becoming increasingly more commonplace, technologies such as FreeSync have been developed to combat screen tearing in varying ways, though the presence of multiple standards can complicate things for the average user.

It was only recently that Sony added variable refresh rate, or VRR, support to PlayStation 5 on all supported displays. This feature dynamically syncs the television or monitor's refresh rate to the console's frame rate output, which can greatly alleviate screen tearing and improve gameplay smoothness across the board. Now, however, Sony may be looking to improve its frame rate technology stack even further still.

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According to a new patent filing from Sony, PlayStation 5's VRR support could be due for an upgrade sometime down the line. One of the company's latest patent applications describes a special frame rate compensation system that leverages scanouts to smooth out any potential frame dips in taxing gameplay sections. The process includes scanning out the GPU's rendered frames and compensating for fluctuations from the desired target frame rate. And since the described process uses frame buffers to accomplish this job, it's not entirely dissimilar to Nvidia's proprietary G-Sync monitor technology, for example.

In some instances, as the patent describes, the entire frame scanout and compensation process could even be offloaded to a dedicated coprocessor of some sort, which could tie in with Sony's recent multi-GPU hardware patent. Of course, the two listings describe different use cases