The Last Guardian can run at 60 frames per second on PlayStation 5, making it the ultimate way to play the game. That’s the headline and the video on this page speaks for itself. We’ve never seen director Fumito Ueda’s creation run so smoothly on any platform, and certainly not on its original release back in 2016. In fact, by default, the game runs at 30fps on PS5, requiring access to the original gold master version of the title – preserved on Blu-ray disc – to let this classic title spread its wings on Sony’s next generation hardware.
There are many legacy PlayStation 4 titles that see transformative improvements when run on PS5 under backwards compatibility, but The Last Guardian is special simply because of how challenging it is to run well on either of Sony’s last-gen machines, with frame-rates often dipping well beneath the 30fps target. And just the game ran so poorly was always a point of contention too. On PS4 Pro, whether you ran at native 1080p or via its 4K output mode, there were still performance bottlenecks – though you clearly got a smoother ride with the console set to full HD output. Inconsistency remained, however, suggesting that graphics may have only been one particularly limitation – and that the CPU was often taxed to its limits too.
Installing the game on PlayStation 5 fully patched resolves any slowdown issues, giving the expected lock to 30 frames per second, but it’s the gold master code that is of more interest to us, because the 1.0 rendition of the game does indeed run fully unlocked, the result being that all of PS5’s Zen 2 CPU and 10.28TF GPU power can be deployed in running the game as fast as possible, up to the 60fps cap imposed by v-sync. However, it’s also interesting to see PS4 Pro hardware running this original code too, where the limitations of the machine are laid bare. As you’ll see in the embedded video below, where we test all the various iterations offered by the 1.0 and current 1.3 patches, the difference is often stark. And with performance often dipping into the mid-20s on PS4 Pro, PS5’s almost flawless 60fps delivers one the most impressive multipliers in gen-on-gen frame-rate seen yet.
As I said, the footage speaks for itself, and while later stages of the game may cause more issues for the PlayStation 5, I could only find one section that gave the new hardware pause, dipping into 50s. Clearly, it’s a radical improvement over the compromised PS4 and PS4 Pro versions, but there are plenty of caveats to contend with. The first one is simple: this is the original rendition of the game, meaning that later improvements made to The Last Guardian are completely absent: while 4K rendering and PS4 Pro support is in, HDR options are not. Tweaks to the analogue sticks’ deadzone when dealing with camera motion were also made, as were a bunch of bug fixes. By sticking to 1.0 code, you don’t have access to these improvements. Not only that, but as long as you are online, the PS5 badgers you to update the game every time you boot it – and as the patch is quite small, you have to be quick off the mark in pausing it.