Sony’s PSSR AI upscaler falls short of expectations in PS5 Pro titles

Sony’s PS5 Pro PSSR AI upscaler fails to impress – Visual artifacts make some games look worse on PS5 Pro

Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro is based on three technological pillars. First, it has a stronger GPU and faster memory. Second, it has enhanced ray-tracing capabilities. Finally, there is PSSR, Sony’s new AI upscaling solution. Sadly, PSSR is not delivering the promised results, often delivering worse image quality than Sony’s PlayStation 5 console.

Digital Foundry has analysed multiple PlayStation 5 Pro titles and discovered that many games suffer from image quality issues when using PSSR. Games with issues include Dragon’s Dogma 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Star Wars: Outlaws, and Silent Hill 2. Below, we have included Digital Foundry’s video describing this issue.

Silent Hill 2 has since been updated to address its image quality issues with PSSR. How did they address the issue? They disabled Sony’s upscaler and instead used Unreal Engine 5’s temporal upscaling solution. They abandoned Sony’s purpose-built PS5 Pro upscaling solution as it didn’t deliver the expected image quality boost.

For Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Sony’s upscaler presents shimmering around foliage and issues that lower the quality of the game’s ray tracing effects. This isn’t good for a game that relies heavily on ray-traced effects and mostly takes place in forested environments. Thanks to this and other issues, Avatar now looks worse on PlayStation 5 Pro than it does on PlayStation 5. That should never be the case for an upgraded console.

Currently, it is unknown why PSSR isn’t working as expected in games. Are developers implementing it poorly? Did Sony not train the AI using games that heavily used ray tracing? Either way, Sony needs to improve their PSSR upscaler. As it stands, one of the PlayStation 5 Pro’s three pillars is crumbling…

Like all AI upscalers, PSSR will improve as Sony’s AI model advances and technology improves. Sony will need to work to ensure that these improvements come quickly and that PS5 Pro games with poor upscaler implementations are patched to address today’s image quality issues.

You can join the discussion on Sony’s image quality issues with PSSR on the OC3D Forums.