No speed up and slow down tricks, no AI enhancements, this is Uncharted 4 running at an uncapped framerate that, at times, hit’s a solid 60 frames-per-second (fps) at a cost of image quality. Fair warning, you may want to apply some eyedrops when checking out these Uncharted 4 60fps patch’s images and video.

Similar to the recent unofficial Bloodborne 60fps patch, an unofficial method had been published by scene researcher and Modder, illusion0001 to give Uncharted 4 a boost in framerate. How? Well by lowering the game’s resolution, not to 720P, but to 540P on the base PS4 console. Here’s a few shots to show the differences.

It actually looks a lot worse when it’s in motion, but you should be able to tell the differences. There are also many graphical glitches, one of them seen above with the artifacts appearing during 540P and not in the standard resolution. Even so, this technique of cutting the resolution down proved, in our testing, that it could indeed hold a 60fps during certain segments, such as cutscenes and some combat moments. 

Unofficial Uncharted 4 60fps Patch Tested

Using the information found of illusion0001’s blog, we were able to implement the 540P resolution and debug menu in a vanilla copy of Uncharted 4 (1.00) running on a jailbroken console. The results? When setting the framerate to unlock via the debug menu and applying the 540P change, we get an uncapped framerate that at times, can manage a 60fps lock (mostly cutscenes) though at a huge cost to the overall image quality.

Seeing if we could improve this further ourselves, we decided to lower the resolution to a staggering 360P. It didn’t really improve much, if only by a frame or two, but the image quality definitely took the hit. 

It seems that 540P is the “sweet” spot when it comes to having an uncapped FPS experience, at least on the base PS4.

Running this modification on the PS4 Pro may prove to offer a more stable fps and at a higher resolution, though we sadly can’t test this out ourselves as we don’t own a Pro console that can run the current modification. According to illusion001 on his Youtube demonstration, the Pro should be capable of 720P during GPU powered scenes, but would likely still be limited by the CPU during combat and other scenes resulting in the same dips. 

Uncharted 4 60fps Dream Might Be Achievable on PS5

If there is one major plus to this, this modification should be fully possible to run on the PS5 without huge sacrifices to the resolution. Unfortunately, this is all entirely up to Naughty Dog for public implementation, otherwise the only PS5 consoles that can run this are those that can run unsigned code, such as a dev/test unit or one that has been hacked (if there are any). 

Eurogamer were fortunate enough to have witness this at first hand as they were given footage of Bloodborne running at 60fps on the PS5 back in March. Perhaps with this method now public, we may see Uncharted 4 running at a closer 60fps lock with higher resolution on the PS5 hardware than it does on jailbroken PS4s. There may be some additional work needed, as we noticed some graphical errors such as screen artifacts, however that could be due to the lower resolution and the CPU being pushed to run the uncapped FPS.  

Only time will tell, though given Sony recent releases receiving a 60fps patches (Days Gone, God of War, Ratchet & Clank) perhaps the Uncharted series might be next in line to get some enhancements, along with The Last of Us Part 2. One could only hope.