Stellar Blade Suffers From High Input Lag, Developer Recommends Enabling Game Mode On TVs

Sony Interactive Entertainment and Shift Up’s upcoming action adventure game, Stellar Blade, suffers from a high amount of input lag.

Using a high speed camera, YouTuber MierdaMeGusta performed an input lag test on the recently released Stellar Blade demo to measure the delay between controller input and the action beginning on-screen. Based on their findings, the game suffers from 13.8 frames or 230 ms of latency in Performance mode, which is very high for a game that runs at 60 fps. They didn’t factor the inherent input delay on their display into the equation, however, which should be subtracted from the total in order to determine the actual game latency.

Meanwhile, developer Shift Up addressed the issue on the official Stellar Blade Twitter/X account. As per their recommendation, those who find controls to be slow to respond should enable Game Mode on their displays. They added that doing so will make the response more immediate.

Digital Foundry’s Alexander Battaglia noted that Unreal Engine has a curious history of high input latency on PlayStation consoles for no good reason. He mentioned that a delay of 230 ms would be “particularly poor”, even for a game that runs at 30 fps. As per him, it’s on the development team at Shift Up to fix this issue.

Unfortunately, it appears that the developer either isn’t aware of the issue or doesn’t find it to be as such, given its recommendation of enabling Game mode on TVs. Modern HDMI controls automatically switch the display’s picture mode to one that is best suited to the device it is connected to.

Previously, during an interview with Famitsu, Stellar Blade director Kim Hyung Tae mentioned that Stellar Blade will not include a photo mode at launch. According to him, the studio is currently focused on polishing the title. However, he added that if there are sufficient requests from players to include the mode, the development team will try its best to respond to them.