Update 4.5 for the PlayStation 4 Pro consoles added a Boost Mode feature that was designed to provide more processing and GPU power for existing games that were not going to be upgraded to a more functional «enhanced» mode. For regular PS4 games, this Boost Mode offers a slight drop in stability to keep everything looking stable throughout the experience. There was some hope that this new feature would offer something extra for PlayStation VR games, our research shows that this will not happen.
Most of the games that have benefited from this Boost Mode feature have experienced things that cannot happen in PlayStation VR games. Boost Mode captures underperforming games at 30fps or 60fps, making games look consistently better in all kinds of gameplay. But PlayStation VR games come with a performance requirement, they must play either at 60fps redesigned to 120fps or at the original 90fps and 120fps. This is very bad for the user experience, especially for those who are prone to nausea if the frame rate in a VR game stutters, so Boost Mode will never help for this kind of experience.
This frame lock means that performance losses in many PlayStation VR games can be found in detail, and in this regard, the PlayStation 4 Pro already improves your experience. Games that haven’t been «enhanced» with the update already offer more visual detail on PS4 Pro, so turning on this boost mode is not a comparison of the experience of two different types of PlayStation 4. You’re comparing PS4 Pro — a slightly more native GPU-enabled version, and in our tests, there were no noticeable visual differences in the 15 games we tested with the feature on and off.
Many of the most popular PlayStation VR games have also been updated to support the expanded PS4 Pro feature set. If you play games like Eve: Valkyrie, Eagle Flight or Rez Infinite, you see the best these games have to offer on the PlayStation 4. It is expected that most PlayStation VR games released in the future will be released as expansion games. So this boost mode is unlikely to ever be useful for a headset.
Updated September 22, 2017. We’ve updated this post to make sure you’re getting as much information as possible about boost mode.
