PS5 Pro Upgraded PSSR + Enhance Image Quality Mode Analysis – Over 20 Games Tested [Digital Foundry]

“The reveal of an upgraded PSSR in Resident Evil Requiem set the stage, but the March 16 firmware update for PS5 Pro brought about full delivery of the promise. Sony’s revised upscaler, a product of its fruitful Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD, didn’t just enable the new technology across a range of selected titles, but also offered up a system level toggle that essentially allowed users to swap out the older, somewhat lacking PSSR for the brand-new version. And that’s the primary focus of this piece – to return to the games where PSSR didn’t quite hit the target and to see how “PSSR2” could make a difference.

But let’s get down to brass tacks and explain the three ways in which the new PSSR can be activated on PS5 Pro. Firstly, there are 11 titles whitelisted by developers, where the new system software completely removes all evidence of the first PSSR, effectively forcing in the new version. We’ve already looked at five such games.

Secondly, there’s the system-level Enhanced Image Quality toggle available on the front-end. By default, it’s disabled, but turn it on and *any* game or indeed demo that uses the old PSSR will now switch over to the new. Finally, there’s a small group of games that ship or are patched with the new upscalers. Recent releases like Resident Evil Requiem and Crimson Desert fall into this category.

So, officially at least, there are only 13 games we can confirm that natively use the new PSSR – either by being new games or else via the system software whitelist. Basically, you should be using that Enhanced Image Quality toggle to see the full benefit.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see that the prior examples we have tested with the new PSSR effectively translate over to the vast majority of games out there. At a stroke, Sony has improved a vast swathe of the Pro’s library. In Gran Turismo 7, for example, fine edges on cars and painted lines on the tarmac no longer break or shimmer, looking more coherent in motion. Already decent PSSR-supported titles like Assassin’s Creed Shadows look even better. In that case, the presentation is sharper with distant texture detail more clearly resolved.

The old PSSR exhibited a strange, film grain-like noise when the image was at rest. The new PSSR eliminates this problem, looking cleaner and more stable. It’s also better equipped to handle more challenging reconstruction scenarios – exemplified by titles using Lumen software RTGI. The original PSSR tended to misinterpret Lumen’s artefacts as noise, amplifying the problem. The new PSSR seems much better at distinguishing genuine detail from stochastic noise, now looking as stable as Epic’s own integrated TSR scaler.

Foliage was also a challenge for the old PSSR, with the brilliant Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Hogwarts Legacy genuinely struggling – often looking worse than existing upscaling solutions, especially in motion. Yes, even FSR2. The new PSSR does a far superior job in maintaining decent-looking foliage and suppressing noise. Star Wars Jedi Survivor and Star Wars Outlaws also see visible improvements, with a far cleaner look, even if there is a slight increase in flicker in some scenarios.

The next test? Particles and transparencies. These effects are challenging for upscalers to deal with, often because there are no motion vectors for the technologies to work with on these elements. The result is that often, these effects are diminished or can disappear completely. The original PSSR wasn’t bad in this respect, but there’s now a sharper presentation to these elements and less tendency for these components to dissolve into the background.

I was also impressed to see that screen-space reflections benefit too. Astrobot wasn’t a particularly great implementation of PSSR back in the day, with noticeable SSR flicker. This is now resolved with the new PSSR. Moire patterns on fine fabric patterns and reflective surfaces – as seen in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s opening set-pieces – are also much improved and suggestive of a higher resolution.

But it’s not a complete, across-the-board success. In fact, we’ve yet to find a fully comprehensive upscaler that can address every single problem area. So there can be some new quirks specific to the new PSSR, or existing artefacts that look different now, but still aren’t quite right.

In Star Wars Jedi Survivor, RT reflections can look sharp and noisy in motion, especially in water-heavy scenes and some might prefer the older, blurrier look. Here you need to weigh up that artefact against clearly superior results elsewhere. We’ve also seen a subtle dot pattern in some new PSSR presentations, embedded into textures. It isn’t especially distracting, but it’s not right.

Similarly – and perhaps inevitably – Dragon’s Dogma 2 showcases where the new PSSR excels and where it retains lingering issues. Superficially, it’s actually doing a great job, but at the same time, distant foliage looks strangely blurred. Similarly, the bizarre “holes” in the RTGI issues – where moving the camera reveals missing or under-sampled GI that fills in over time – is still there, especially in the lower resolution performance mode. Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Heavy rain can sometimes vanish against certain backgrounds.

The thing is, the drawbacks need to be weighted against the improvements – and they are far less of an issue in that context. And you can’t help that targeted patches from motivated developers could make all the difference.

Further testing has also confirmed that the new PSSR with all of its benefits has the same operational cost as the old (indeed Mark Cerny says it’s 100 micro-seconds faster). This was confirmed in our tests on Monster Hunter Wilds, while Hogwarts Legacy suggested differences on the order of half a frame per second over extended captures, easily fitting into margin of error territory.

All of which makes the lack of official upgrades for Sony’s own first party games a little curious. PS5 Pro now ships with two upscalers – and one is clearly inferior to the other, with few (if any disadvantages). The most plausible explanation is process and policy rather than technological outcomes. Developers may be unwilling to put the time and effort into a new QA pass, for example. Still, we see no reason why you shouldn’t engage the enhance image quality toggle.

And in fact, some of the results we’ve seen are potentially even more mouthwatering. Consider this: from an 864p resolution, Alan Wake 2’s 60fps performance mode on PS5 Pro looks better than the 1270p 30fps quality mode on the standard console. This is potentially very empowering for developers who can focus more on quality of pixels than quantity of pixels.

In conclusion though, we’ve now looked at in excess of 25 games in total on PS5 Pro using the new PSSR and it’s a major win: a drop-in replacement that cleans up most of the first generation upscaler’s issues without compromising performance. There’s still room for improvement, but in image quality terms, this is the moment where PlayStation 5 Pro finally starts to look like the machine it was always meant to be.”