The PlayStation 5 Pro has been a topic of much anticipation, especially with its upgraded PSSR (Performance Scalable Shading Rate) technology. This technology promises to enhance the visual fidelity of games, but the initial results were somewhat underwhelming. However, recent tests with several top-tier games have revealed a significant improvement in the upgraded PSSR, or as it's often called, PSSR2. This development is particularly exciting for gamers and developers alike, as it showcases the potential of the PS5 Pro to deliver on its promises. In this article, I'll delve into the details of these tests and offer my personal analysis and commentary on the results.
The Upgrade: PSSR2 vs. PSSR
The original PSSR implementation on the PS5 Pro was a disappointment, with shimmering vegetation, strobing global illumination, and flickering sub-pixel detail. It looked worse than the base PS5 version's TSR (Temporal Super-Resolution) technology. However, the upgraded PSSR2 addresses these issues, delivering a cleaner, more stable, and more attractive final image. In Silent Hill f, for instance, the new PSSR2 transforms the game from a demonstration of PSSR's failures to a showcase of its capabilities. The pulsing RTGI (Ray-Traced Global Illumination) is gone, and the vegetation and foliage rendering is crisp and consistent.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: A Fine Example of PSSR2
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was one of the finest examples of the original PSSR's implementation, thanks to relatively high base resolutions and content choices. The new PSSR2 sorts out the issues, delivering crisper edges, reduced aliasing, and improved foliage. Texture detail also looks visibly improved, perhaps due to a more aggressive negative mipmap bias. The PS5 Pro was supposed to deliver the base PS5's 30fps quality mode at 60fps, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth finally achieves this, with even higher image quality.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Monster Hunter Wilds
Dragon Age: The Veilguard still shows improvement with PSSR2, with better foliage quality, reduced noise, and fewer reconstruction artefacts. Monster Hunter Wilds, an open-world game with less visually impressive graphics, also benefits from the upgraded PSSR2. Anti-aliasing qualities are significantly improved, sub-pixel detail is resolved more convincingly, and specular noise and screen-space reflections are more stable, especially in the lower resolution performance mode.
The Future of PSSR2
The evidence suggests that the PS5 Pro's PSSR2 upgrade doesn't come at the cost of decreased frame rates. Smarter training and better weighting can unlock image quality gains at the same compute cost. This is a pleasant surprise, as it indicates that the PS5 Pro is a massive step closer to realizing its initial promise. However, the question remains: will the ML features of the PS5 Pro continue to grow, or will they be gated off for the PlayStation 6?
Conclusion
In my opinion, the new upscaler delivers the kind of upgrade we were looking for from the PS5 Pro. The hardware was always fascinating, focusing more on improved RT and ML performance than a raw rasterization boost. However, with the launch version of PSSR, the quality of the image quality upgrade varied on a per-title basis and could look worse than the original base PS5 game. That is no longer the case, and that's simply great news. From my perspective, the question is the extent to which the ML features of the PS5 Pro will continue to grow, and I'm eager to see what the future holds for this exciting technology.
