Potential Stellar Blade Demo Input Lag Fix Discovered by Fan

04.04.2024 - 13:52 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

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.

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.

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