Analysis: PS4 Pro’s “Boost Mode” bumps frame rates up to 38 percent

This Digital Foundry video goes into detail about the PS4 Pro's Boost Mode improvements on many games.

Earlier this week, we were surprised by reports that the new Version 4.5 beta firmware for the PlayStation 4 Pro offered an unannounced "Boost Mode" promising "improved gameplay, including higher frame rates, for some games that were released before the introduction of PS4 Pro." The folks over at the excellent Digital Foundry have now put that new mode through its paces, finding frame rate increases of up to 38 percent on unpatched PS4 games.

Those frame rate improvements are very dependent on the specific title in question, though. Destiny for instance, is locked to 30fps in its code, and thus gets no benefit from Boost Mode. An intensive online shooter like Battlefield 4, on the other hand, can stay at a solid 60fps in Boost Mode, without the frequent frame-rate dips that can occur during a 64-player match in base mode.

Many games seem to see the same modest 14 percent bump in their frame rates in Boost Mode. That coincidentally matches the 14 percent faster clock speed that the PS4 Pro's GPU has over the original system (911Mhz vs 800Mhz), suggesting that the additional processor cycles are helping on GPU-limited games. Boost Mode doesn't seem to make any use of the 18 additional compute cores available in the PS4 Pro, however—for that, you need a game-specific patch to be coded by the developer.

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