Bloodborne fans have pleaded for an update to the game since Sony’s more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro was revealed in 2016. But those fans have had no relief, not even on PlayStation 5, where Bloodborne runs much as it did on the original PlayStation 4. Modders have since stepped in to patch in unofficial support for 60 frames per second refresh rates, and now the folks at Digital Foundry have taken things a step further, giving Bloodborne a 4K makeover.
Digital Foundry pulled this off with the help of an AI image-upscaling tool called Video Enhance AI by Topaz Labs, processing pre-recorded 1080p resolution footage up to 4K resolution. It’s not perfect, and as Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter and John Linneman point out, much of that has to do with Bloodborne’s “distinctive visual quirks.” The game’s anti-aliasing, chromatic aberration, and specular aliasing make for a “noisy image,” Digital Foundry explains, visual quirks that AI upscaling models may not know how to contend with.
The result looks nice, if perhaps unusually smooth in parts. It’s not quite Smooth Yoda levels of uncanniness, but some of the grit and detail appears to get lost during the resolution boost. Still, it’s probably the closest we’ll get to seeing Bloodborne rendered at 4K/60 fps, since Sony and FromSoftware seem unwilling to take on the task themselves, six years into the game’s life.