PS1, PS2, PSP Games Won’t All Support Higher FPS on PS Plus

PlayStation revealed on March 29 its new PS Plus subscription program, which was nicknamed Spartacus through rumors, and now that the cat is out of the bag, Jim Ryan gave several interviews, where he most notably talked about frame rate and additional features for PS1, PS2, and PSP games running on PS4 and PS5.

Sony announced an all-new PlayStation Plus subscription service that includes two new tiers, Extra and Premium. The priciest Premium subscription will unlock backward compatibility with a catalog of hundreds of PS1, PS2, and PSP generation games, playable through either downloading or cloud streaming. However, each game will support different additional features and improvements.

Jim Ryan explains not all PS1, PS2, PSP games in PS Plus Premium will be able to run at higher FPS

In an interview with Famitsu, Sony’s CEO Jim Ryan was asked if older PS1 to PSP games will support new features when compared to the original games, like giving players an option to run the games at higher frame rates. We translated his answer:

Jim Ryan: “We’ll detail all that in the future, but I’ve heard from those who actually played and tried it out that the games look very nice on PS4 and PS5. But the additional features supported will be different for each game.”

In other words, this means that some of the games will run the same way as on their home consoles, and won’t necessarily run better on PS4 and PS5. There are many games on PS1, PS2, or PSP with frame rate drops and slowdowns, so I personally think this is a huge bummer that this backward compatibility won’t systematically support options to correct these flaws.