Grainy and unstable images, some games look worse on PSSR than on PS5

The PlayStation 5 Pro console has been on the market for over a week now, and during this time we and a number of other editors and players have managed to test most of the games, both those that have received the patch and those that are benefiting. passively from higher performance. However, by far the most interesting and impressive element is not so much the performance, but Sony’s new PSSR scaling, which most developers have chosen to implement in their games instead of FSR or other alternatives. However, it is gradually becoming clear that this is not a good idea everywhere.

Some games benefit greatly from the new technology, such as Stellar Blade, The Last of Us Part 1 and Part 2 Remastered, or Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. However, even with them, during testing we encountered graininess, which occurs when scaling and can spoil the already good image quality.

Unfortunately, there are games where the grain is even worse. These are, for example, Alan Wake 2 (our analysis here), Silent Hill 2 Remake, Dragon Age: The Veilguard or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia and Oliver McKenzie took a look at the last mentioned game, which has been plagued by technical issues since its release.

They found that the frame rate was stable and the internal resolution was slightly higher, but the resulting image was essentially worse than the base PS5 in all respects. On a stationary camera, when the image should be very stable, the already mentioned grain appears, but in motion it is even worse. This causes extreme image instability, namely very unpleasant flickering or outright flickering, which is most noticeable on vegetation. Players on the original PS5, paradoxically, can enjoy not problem-free, but significantly more stable and cleaner images.

The severity of the shortcomings and the speed at which they occur are simply astounding. Regardless of whether the problem is on the implementation side or directly in the upscaling, we hope that it will be fixed as soon as possible. Until that happens, perhaps developers should consider giving players, at least temporarily, the ability to play original PS5 modes.