Word emerged last week that with a simple mod, owners of the Xbox Series X console were able to revisit The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and to play it at full 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. The evidence looked compelling and I wanted to try it out - and once confirmed, I had a whole bunch of further questions I wanted answers to. Would the mod work on Xbox Series S? What about PlayStation 5? And as Fallout 4 also supports mods on consoles, I had to wonder whether there was any way to run the game at 60fps there, ahead of Microsoft's official patch set to do the same thing?
The outlook is transformed on Series X thanks to the console's backwards compatibility features. First of all, it's worth stressing that once installed, Skyrim needs to be shut down and rebooted for the mod to kick in - and the improvement is transformative. Most of the game plays out locked at 60fps and the tearing brought about by the mod is completely gone. In effect, the Uncap FPS mod removes the 30fps limit, while the back-compat features in Series X enforce v-sync, giving a mostly flawless presentation.
PlayStation 5? Well, I did try it. Mods are available, but there is no frame-rate mod that I could find that could do the same job as Uncap FPS on Xbox machines. What you do get is a much tighter lock to 30 frames per second than the PlayStation 4 version of the game, but it is unclear as to whether a frame-rate unlock mod is even possible on the Sony platform. Generally speaking, it's understood that mod support is somewhat more limited, but if the opportunity is there, hopefully showcasing how transformative Uncap FPS is will see a mod arrive.
