The new PS5 firmware seems to boost performance "in very select scenarios"

It looks like the new PS5 firmware update that rolled out last week may slightly improve your console's performance.

The performance improvement was initially spotted by Digital Foundry as it tested the heat differences between the new and old PS5 models (ultimately finding that they run pretty much the same, thermally speaking). Those initial tests were done when the new PS5 update is still in beta, but Digital Foundry conducted more tests after its public release and found the improvements remained consistent

"In very select scenarios, it does seem all PlayStation 5s are running faster than they were before with this new firmware," Digital Foundry editor Richard Leadbetter said in the latest DF Direct weekly discussion video. "Only a couple of percentage points in it, I think it's like 3% max, but you can have like a 1% margin of error there."

The tests indicated that "fringe scenarios" such as ray tracing seemed to be especially impacted by the firmware update, with the test case games being Control and Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition.

These differences in performance are so minor that there's a good chance you'd never notice the extra one or two frames per second without specifically putting the new and old firmware side by side. Even still, it's encouraging to see Sony squeezing more performance out of its new-gen console as it nears the first anniversary of its launch.

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