Summary
- Some players have been reporting that the Stellar Blade demo suffers from severe input lag following its late March release.
- The problem can potentially be fixed by disabling the HDCP option in the PS5 settings.
- While the exact scope of the issue remains unclear, there are some indications that the Stellar Blade demo input delay is only affecting a fraction of the player base.
The Stellar Blade demo input lag that's been troubling a vocal section of the game's fandom since late March can reportedly be fixed by disabling the HDCP option in the PlayStation 5 settings. This was recently discovered by one inquisitive Stellar Blade player after some tinkering.
The first-ever non-mobile game by South Korean studio Shift Up is scheduled to hit the market on April 26. Following the premature release and subsequent removal of the Stellar Blade demo, the playable slice of the game was finally officially made available on March 29. Since then, a number of PS5 owners have been complaining about the game suffering from input lag. While accounts of its intensity vary, some have described the problem as so severe that it made the game extremely difficult to play due to how sluggish Eve felt to control.
Stellar Blade Dev Already Staffing Up for Next Game
While Stellar Blade is still a few weeks away from hitting the market, its developer already appears to be getting ready to tackle another project.
A potential fix for this issue has now been discovered by Reddit user MacReadyToast, who found that disabling the HDCP toggle under the PS5 system settings "cured" any semblance of input delay on their end. The tip promptly found its way to the front page of the game's largest subreddit, with multiple people claiming that it helped either reduce or outright eliminate input lag in the Stellar Blade demo.
How To Fix Stellar Blade Demo Input Lag
- Open the Settings menu from the PlayStation 5 home screen.
- Navigate to System → HDMI.
- Disable the Enable HDCP toggle.
Enabling the game/gaming mode on one's TV, if one is supported, may also mitigate the Stellar Blade input delay issue.
As for the potential culprit behind this issue, HDCP is short for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, a proprietary Intel solution meant to prevent unauthorized copying of audiovisual content while it travels between connections, usually an output device and a monitor or TV. Most modern HDMI cables support HDCP, but the technology itself can usually be disabled on the software side of things, as is the case with both the PS5 and PS4.
The exact scope of the Stellar Blade demo input lag problem remains unclear. But since online complaints about it are only in the low hundreds, it's plausible that the majority of people who downloaded the demo experienced no issues with their input being noticeably delayed. This would suggest that the problem is specific to some TVs. Shift Up has recently advised fans to enable gaming modes on their television sets in order to mitigate the problem, but this has seemingly not fully resolved the situation for all affected users, based on social media responses to that suggestion.
Input delay issues appear sporadically across a wide variety of games, and don't discriminate by genre or platform. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot, Rust, Apex Legends, and Genshin Impact have all exhibited input lag in recent years, as did dozens of other popular titles. Many of those cases ended with developers addressing such problems in a fairly swift manner so that their players didn't have to tinker with their device settings.
Stellar Blade
- Released
- April 26, 2024
WHERE TO PLAY
RECLAIM EARTH FOR HUMANKIND The future of humanity hangs in the balance in Stellar Blade, an all-new story-driven action adventure. Ravaged by strange, powerful creatures, Earth has been abandoned, and what is left of the decimated human race has fled to a Colony in outer space. After travelling from the Colony, 7th Airborne Squad member EVE arrives on the desolate remains of our planet with a clear-cut mission: to save humankind by reclaiming Earth from the Naytiba – the malevolent force that has devastated it. But as EVE tackles the Naytiba one-by-one, piecing together the mysteries of the past in the ruins of human civilization, she realizes that her mission is far from straightforward. In fact, almost nothing is as it seems…
- Developer(s)
- Shift Up
- Publisher(s)
- Sony Interactive Entertainment
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG
