Sony 2020 ‘Ready For PS5’ TVs Are Finally Ready For… Xbox Series X

Gamers who own one of Sony’s 2020 X900H (US) and X90H (Europe) TVs will be delighted to hear that their sets will soon be receiving a firmware update that finally makes them capable of handling variable refresh rates.

And when I say ‘finally’, I mean it. For while Sony managed to add 4K at 120Hz playback to the X900H/X90H TVs via firmware in time for the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series X in November 2020, the brand’s promise to also add variable refresh rate and auto low latency mode (ALLM) switching support by the end of that year fell by the wayside. 

In fact, it seemed to have fallen into a black hole. It wasn’t until this week that, pretty much out of the blue, news started to emerge out of China (of all places) that Sony had formally announced the VRR/ALLM update for X900H/X90H TVs there. 

Since then, as reported by flatpanelshd, a Reddit user has also spotted the v6.1288 update file online for other regions. Though it’s important to add that Sony has not formally announced the update for any other regions outside of China, and has also issued a statement saying that this first VRR firmware is not final and so could contain bugs.

While the arrival of the VRR updates is obviously good if belated news for X900H/X90H owners, it does come with a certain irony attached. For while these TVs were, along with Sony’s Z8H/ZH8 8K sets, the only models from the Japanese brand’s 2020 range that were designated ‘Ready for PlayStation 5’ in a major (and ultimately rather awkward) marketing campaign, their new VRR capabilities have arrived before VRR has actually been enabled on the PS5 console. So in effect the new VRR update makes the X900H/X90H TVs more ‘ready for Xbox Series X’ (Microsoft’s console has supported VRR from launch).

It’s worth noting that the VRR update for X900H/X90H TVs only appears to support the core HDMI VRR system; there doesn’t seem to be any support for either the AMD Freesync or Nvidia G-Sync systems.

It also seems strange, finally, that Sony has yet to roll out the VRR update for any of its 2021 TV range, despite many of these models being more game-friendly out of the box than the X900H/X90H models. You’ve got to think the VRR update for these 2021 TVs can’t be far behind, and Sony has stated on more than one occasion that it will arrive before the end of 2021 – but then you only have to look back to the start of this article to see that we’ve been caught out by that sort of optimistic talk before!

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