PS5 Pro's PSSR: A Game-Changer in AI Upscaling Technology

PS5 Pro and PSSR impress in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered

I think it's fair to say that The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered is perhaps not the highest priority when it comes to receiving a PS5 Pro upgrade. Packing a reasonable 1440p60 and 4K30 performance split on base PS5 consoles, the game was already delivering a good visual experience on Sony's 2020 hardware - but there is a compromise between image fluidity and image clarity. Part 2's PS5 Pro outing seeks to eliminate that gap, aiming to deliver a 4K-like visual experience at a full-fat 60fps frame-rate target by using Sony's new machine learning PSSR upscaling solution. How does PSSR fare in our first extended look at the technology? Is this a good replacement for native 4K, or does it fall short of that lofty target? Developer Naughty Dog is refreshingly open about the basic rendering setup in this update. The new "Pro" mode delivers a 4K final image with PSSR upsampling from a 1440p internal resolution at 60fps. That means we're looking at a new rendering option that superficially seems similar to the old Performance mode, with the same internal rendering resolution and frame-rate target, so most image quality differences here should come down to that new reconstruction method. In side-by-sides, the PSSR upscale is delivering a lot of extra image detail relative to the old 1440p render. The difference can be surprisingly stark at times, like with the fine textures and water droplets on Abby's backpack, which are rendered with much more detail on Pro. Part 2 has some very nice art assets, and PSSR exposes a lot of texture detail that's obscured on the base machine. It also does a good job of avoiding moiré patterns on fine texture detail, which is very good for an upsampling solution. Texture art at oblique angles also resolves more clearly, though I believe anisotropic filtering settings are unchanged. Geometric edges also look quite a bit sharper and better-defined than on the base console. The PS5 looked fine, but had a slightly soft-focus look on a 4K set, with edge detail deadened by a more moderate rendering resolution combined with TAA. The Pro delivers a much stronger result here, without the blurred edges characteristic of regular upscalers. Perhaps the most obvious edge though comes down to the way the game's alpha-tested foliage resolves. The game's old foliage had a slightly rough appearance at range, and tended to look coarser in general, even at a closer distance to the camera. PSSR is doing a better job of resolving these elements, and it looks like the art may have been tweaked to help accommodate this as well. Image detail at rest is improved quite a lot overall. The extent that matters depends on how you choose to play PS5 - whether you view the game at close range on a monitor, where image clarity differences are often more apparent, or at a longer distance on a TV, where sometimes they can seem more subdued. One issue that is quite apparent at all viewing ranges is image breakup, as flickering on high-contrast edges tends to catch the eye even if a slight softness throughout the frame is harder to perceive. Here the Pro delivers solid results. Pushing forward through the scene tends to cause quite a lot of image breakup on the regular console, as you can observe the appearance of aliasing over many frames, but the Pro is substantially better. Foliage in particular sees a big bump, with slight AI upscale artifacts and a bit of blur proving preferable to the aliasing that was dominant before. In some instances, we find similar breakup across both machines, but PS5 Pro typically provides a lot more image detail as a trade-off. Other typical pain points for temporal AA techniques tend to fare reasonably well here. Hair appears a bit less dithered and resolves with more detail. Screen space reflections often appear more temporally stable here and coherent, though I did note a small visual bug in one scene, and puddles sometimes reveal additional checkerboard-like SSR artifacts on Pro. There's also no obvious issues with 2D elements like snowflakes, which can sometimes cause issues with trails in some reconstruction solutions. The comparison with performance mode perhaps flatters the Pro a little bit, because the baseline expectation is that the Pro should be delivering a better image. But what about the PS5's fidelity mode, which offers a full 4K image with TAA at a default 30fps? The most obvious difference is that the Pro is actually resolving more image detail, which is especially clear in texture art. Edge detail also appears somewhat sharper, and the foliage - in common with the performance mode - takes on a more refined appearance on Pro. I do think it's important to realise that some of these detail bumps are not going to be apparent from a typical viewing distance for most players, given the 4K image on the base machine, but if we do take a closer look they stand out. There are definitely some elements where PSSR is just doing a flat-out better job resolving fine detail than the old TAA, like rendering distinct bars in a metal fence in the background of a scene. Sometimes it does look just a touch sharp though to my eyes, which wouldn't be that noticeable on a TV screen but does sometimes look slightly unnatural in close-ups. One rare exception can come down to water rendering, where fast-moving streams can suffer from a little bit of additional blur here across the water surface, with a softer riverbed below. Here, the performance mode and Pro deliver similar results, with the fidelity mode appearing substantially sharper. Moving transparencies like this often suffer a bit with reconstruction, though the results here look fine enough. Image stability is somewhat more mixed. Head-to-heads in most scenes reveal that both machines offer a consistent and temporally stable image from a normal viewing distance. There is a bit of a trend on Pro to resolve a bit more detail, while also suffering from extra image breakup. For instance, hanging strings on the base console become faint and flicker lightly in and out of view, while the Pro resolves sharper lines that have a tendency to pulse over multiple frames. The Pro definitely delivers clearer foliage rendering, but we do see obvious breakup - and occasionally a bit of PSSR blur as well. Rarely, scenes expose substantially more breakup on Pro than the base console. In typical play though, I think both options are doing a good enough job. Most of the underlying visual settings on PS5 Pro though appear to be the same as the PS5 performance mode. This seems pretty common on PS5 Pro 60fps modes, but it doesn't affect the visuals much at all here because those settings are nearly identical to begin with. In certain rare instances, we can observe a bit of pop-in that isn't present in the fidelity mode, like with these sandbags in this cutscene, where the performance mode and Pro deliver identical results. It's also evident in this shot, where I was able to engineer just the slightest bit of pop-in on Pro and the performance mode - but not the fidelity mode. I really have to go out of my way here as this is extremely challenging to spot in almost all of my comparison footage. The only other visual change of note is depth of field, which is deeper on Pro than in either PS5 mode. The depth of field in the fidelity mode and Pro appears to count at the same 1080p resolution, but the upsampling process to 4K may be decreasing that blurring effect. On some occasions the intersection of in-focus and out-of-focus elements can produce a bit of a haloing effect on Pro, though this is also evident at different moments in the PS5 modes as well. There are also some issues with some things appearing to not render correctly on Pro, but these minor discrepancies are likely to be bugs that will be fixed for launch. Perhaps the most interesting point of comparison for Sony's new upsampling solution is going to come against FSR and DLSS temporal upscalers on PC. Unfortunately, we don't have a version of TLOU Part 2 on PC as of yet, but The Last of Us Part 1 can serve as a stand-in for quick-and-dirty comparisons. Relative to AMD's FSR 3, PSSR has clear merits. FSR tends to suffer from a lot of disocclusion issues and aliasing in general whenever there's motion on screen, which PSSR handles much more gracefully. That classic salt-and-pepper pattern of disocclusion fizzle is absent on Pro, and the image in general looks more stable over multiple frames, even with the same base resolution. I suspect that in most titles, the difference between FSR and PSSR will favour the latter, given the kinds of issues we've seen with FSR 2 and 3 since their inception. DLSS is the gold standard for image reconstruction on PC for good reason, with stable imagery across a wide range of game content, and the results in TLOU Part 1 are certainly in line with that trend. We get top-class image quality on PC, especially relative to FSR 3. PSSR tends to present with a bit of extra image breakup on geometric edges and foliage in comparison to DLSS, at least in its early incarnation here. PSSR's infancy is key though, as DLSS has had nearly six years of in-the-wild deployment to develop and evolve to what we have today. Sony developers have confirmed that they've already seen substantial performance and quality improvements with PSSR so far, and I expect that trend will continue. But in the here and now, PSSR at least seems better than FSR at delivering a temporally stable image. As a final note, performance in the new Pro mode appears basically faultless in the footage we've seen so far. A small debug performance counter in the bottom right hand corner of the screen showed a constant 60fps reading, and that solidity is reflected in our own tools too. Cutscene camera cuts are an exception, where a frame appears to be held for anti-aliasing purposes, which drops a single 16ms frame right as the game switches to a new camera angle. Camera cuts while inspecting objects appear to be held for AA as well, and I suspect that other gameplay camera cuts may behave similarly. Interestingly, Naughty Dog is leaving the old PS5 modes in as well - alongside an option to unlock the frame-rate entirely on VRR panels, like we've seen with prior Naughty Dog efforts on PS5. According to the developer though, these older modes really just exist on PS5 Pro as a reminder of how the game looked before. That said, if the full power of the Pro is deployed in the older modes with unlocked frame-rates, you should see a substantial performance edge over the base console. It's likely the 40fps fidelity mode option will remain as well when using 120Hz output with the unlocked toggle on, but without VRR enabled. Overall, I'd say the PS5 Pro's rendition of The Last of Us Part 2 seems successful, even in this pre-release state. It delivers a credible looking 4K image with excellent detail and pretty good image stability, at a virtually flawless 60fps update. It's effectively as Mark Cerny put it in the PS5 Pro announcement video - "achieving fidelity-like graphics at performance frame-rate". Rich came away with similar impressions from his capture session, as he actually played and recorded the PS5 Pro devkit capture used for the accompanying video and screenshots above. Looking forward, I'd be very curious to see how PSSR behaves with lower input resolutions and more challenging game content. The Last of Us offers a satisfying 1440p to 4K upscale, but a lot of demanding PS5 software runs with sub-1080p internal resolutions, sometimes with noisy RT effects. In those situations, FSR is really not up to the task of delivering a stable looking, reasonably sharp image. That bar will be more challenging for PSSR to clear, but that's going to be important in titles like Star Wars Outlaws and Alan Wake 2, both of which are slated to receive Pro upgrades. For now, early indications suggest PSSR, in combination with the Pro, is capable of delivering a solid 4K60 experience in a range of PS5 software, including in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered.

The PS5 Pro's AI Upscaler Is the Only Feature That Really Matters

Juno's New Linux Tablet Is an Easy Escape from Windows and Android Key Takeaways PS5 Pro offers notable hardware upgrades, but not essential, with the main highlight being the PSSR AI-upscaling technology. 4K resolution is excessive for gaming, leading to a need for reconstruction methods. AI upscaling like PSSR is crucial for modern gaming on high-resolution displays. The PlayStation 5 Pro is here, and at a reasonable price given what's packed inside. Yet, despite improvements across the board for Sony's console, the only feature that really matters is the Pro's PSSR AI-upscaling technology. Here's why. The PlayStation 5 Pro's Hardware Upgrades Are Nice, Not Essential Setting aside PSSR for the time being, the PS5 Pro improves on the base model by giving us a bigger, faster GPU. By all accounts, it should, on average, perform around 45% better than the base model GPU. That's the sort of improvement you get by moving up two tiers in the PC GPU stack, or about a 1.5x generational improvement using PC GPUs as an example again. In other words, 45% is nothing to be sniffed at, but it's not the sort of performance uplift I'd ever recommend someone pay for. On PC, I'd always wait until the new card on the same tier offered at least twice the performance of my outgoing GPU, and that usually means 2-3 generations before an upgrade. So, while a 45% increase in raw performance is more than welcome, the PS5 didn't actually need it. When a game is GPU limited, developers always have the option to trim the graphical settings until they reach an acceptable image quality and performance level. Whether they're ever willing to do that is another question, but the fact remains you can work around a limited GPU performance pool. The other big headline upgrade is an improvement to ray tracing performance. Ray tracing was one of the big missteps AMD made for the PS5 and Xbox Series S and X. NVIDIA caught them completely off-guard with the release of their RTX graphics cards, and suddenly there was a major visual technology difference between PC and console. However, better ray tracing performance is again simply a nice-to-have feature at this stage of the game. While I'm an avowed fan and supporter of real-time ray tracing as the future of graphics, most players are hard-pressed to even notice the difference unless you put things side-by-side for them. I'm happy the PS5 Pro addresses this weakness, but it's probably not worth the upgrade by itself. 4K Is the Thorn in the Side of All Gaming The fact that 4K UHD and its enormous pixel count is the current standard for televisions was and remains a major pain in the neck for consoles. To be frank, 4K is significant overkill for video games, and even high-end PC gamers tend to prefer 1440p or 1440p ultrawide even for monitors inches away from their eyes. Even worse, most people sit so far from their TVs that they can't even see the benefits of a native 4K image. Regardless, by modern standards, the GPU in the base PS5 is a 1080p to 1440p class GPU. Modern titles that are exclusive to the PS5 tend to render internally at 1080p or even lower, and then gets upscaled using some type of software method like AMD's FSR. Since it's a fool's errand to squander such a small amount of GPU power on eight million pixels that don't all benefit the viewer, the challenge is how to reconstruct the image on the high-resolution display so that it looks crisp and beautiful to the eye. The Base PS5 Has a Serious Image Quality Problem Which is where we get to the main reason a PS5 Pro was needed in the first place: image quality. Just like ray tracing, AMD completely missed the boat with AI upscaling. So, while a desktop GPU like an RTX 4060 or 3060 Ti would offer very similar baseline performance compared to the PS5 at the same visual setting and internal resolution, NVIDIA's DLSS upscaling technology offers far superior upscaling compared to methods like AMD FSR, which is now commonly used on base PS5 titles. For the most part, current-generation games look fine at 30fps on the base PS5, but if you want to play at a much more pleasant 60fps, it means enduring smeary, blurry, and unpleasant visuals. In my opinion, a lot of PS5 games shouldn't have bothered with a 60fps mode, since the image quality on offer is just too low. Now, if you upgrade nothing else about the base PS5 except for the upscaling method, it would already make an obvious and dramatic difference to existing games. By far the biggest impact, if you ask me. PS5 games look fine, they're just too blurry when you try to push the frame rate. AI Upscaling Is Crucial to Modern Gaming Resolution is one of those easy marketing specs that people love to point at, because a bigger number is always better. Except that there's a point of diminishing returns with 4K, and it's reached long before you actually get there. For that reason, I'm willing to predict that no future console generation will render games at 4K natively, no matter how much GPU power they have. Why? Because you should only render as much resolution as the player's eye can notice, and any horsepower above that level should go to lighting, materials, texture detail, and all the other elements besides resolution that make an image attractive. I'd rather look at a 1080p oil painting than a 4K crayon drawing, is what I'm saying here. The 4K native pixel grid of a television isn't a target to reach, it's an obstacle to overcome when it comes to final image quality. PSSR and technologies like it are the future of making any image look good, regardless of what screen it happens to be on. In my opinion, if Sony had simply refreshed the base PS5 with PSSR hardware, that alone would have been a worthwhile (and much cheaper!) upgrade.

The PS5 Pro Proves AI Upscaling Is the Future - IGN

Now that the PS5 Pro has been revealed, we know a little bit about the hardware that will be powering it. Sony hasn't come out and revealed exactly what generation of graphics it's going to be using, so for all we know, it's still using the RDNA 2 architecture found in the original PS5. After all, if it was using a newer architecture, the '47% increase' in compute units would mean an absolutely monumental lift in performance if it was running on the yet-to-be-revealed RDNA 4 architecture that AMD's next graphics cards will be based on. Yet, there is bespoke hardware in the PS5 Pro, allowing it to use PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), an AI upscaling engine that sounds an awful lot like Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). AMD has yet to update FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) to use the machine learning hardware built into RDNA 3 graphics cards, but that could very well change when the Radeon RX 8000-series is revealed - whenever that will be. PSSR is Sony and AMD's solution for AI upscaling for the PS5 Pro - and likely the PS6 if it's successful. Beyond the fact that it uses machine learning tech to upscale games better than the traditional checkerboard rendering pioneered by the PS4 Pro, Sony hasn't revealed much. Luckily, we can speculate based on existing AI upscaling tech, namely DLSS. DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is the upscaling tech for Nvidia's last few generations of GPUs - dating back to the RTX 2080 in 2018. Essentially, it works by taking data from previously rendered frames, the current frame, and motion information, and plugging it into a neural network. This allows the model to calculate both what the image will look like, and avoids inaccuracies as a result of unpredictable movement. The DLSS model then uses the output to produce a higher resolution image. The neural network for DLSS is the Tensor Cores in Nvidia graphics cards, which are trained by a supercomputer back at Nvidia HQ. Back in the day, this supercomputer had to be individually trained for each game that would support DLSS, slowing down adoption. Over time, though, DLSS 2.0 and 3.0 allowed for any game to implement DLSS, as long as the developer drops a file into the source code of the game.

PlayStation 5 Pro Likely Doesn't Feature Any Sort of AI-Powered Frame Generation Due to Timing; Future Games Will Benefit More From PSSR

The PlayStation 5 Pro doesn't feature any sort of AI-powered frame generation technology due to a few reasons, including timing. Speaking during their podcast, the tech expert at Digital Foundry commented on the lack of any sort of AI-powered frame generation technology for the PlayStation 5 Pro, saying that it is likely that it wasn't included due to timing, as Sony started work on the chip powering the system before technology in the vein of NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation was even a thing. In addition, having machine learning hardware by itself may not lead to much, as, for example, machine learning is only one of the elements that make NVIDIA frame generation technology so good. Performance also probably wasn't seen as much of a concern as image quality, thus upscaling to improve image quality was more of a priority. Lastly, if there's any need for frame generation technology, AMD FSR 3 frame generation will likely work great in combination with PSSR. One thing, however, seems to be certain. The PlayStation 5 Pro's machine learning hardware is only the first step, and it is sure to kick-start Sony's AI research. Even so, it is an amazing starting point that is going to get better over time, based on what happened with the PlayStation 4 Pro checkerboard rendering. Future games will indeed be built around the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution AI-powered upscaler, and will benefit from it way more than current games. The PlayStation 5 Pro launches on November 7th worldwide.

PS5 Pro won't use AI-powered Frame Generation at first: new games will benefit from PSSR

Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console won't have any AI-powered frame generation technology because of a few reasons: one of those being timing. In their recent podcast, Digital Foundry talked about the lack of any AI-powered frame generation technology on the PS5 Pro, and that it's not there because of a lack of timing. Sony started working on the chip (co-developed by AMD, fabbed by TSMC) before NVIDIA's kick-ass DLSS 3 Frame Generation technology was born. Not just that, but machine learning hardware inside of the PS5 Pro was co-developed by AMD, and while it's not amazing on its own -- so Sony leads into the image quality enhancements of the machine learning hardware inside of the PS5 Pro. If there's a need for frame generation technology, the DF staffers talked about using AMD FSR 3 frame generation that will work hand-in-hand with PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) technology in the new PS5 Pro console. Sony is dabbling in AI upscaling leading into its PS5 Pro but more so with its next-generation PlayStation 6 console, so the PS5 Pro is the perfect starting position for Sony's research (along with AMD) into AI, with PSSR being the first (major) step.