Sony Interactive Entertainment has brought substantial improvements to the PSSR AI upscaling technology featured in the PS5 Pro prior to its launch.
During Digital Foundry‘s recent analysis of the PS5 Pro upgraded version of Naughty Dog’s action adventure game, The Last of Us Part II, it was revealed that the upcoming mid-gen console’s PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technology is already seeing substantial improvements in terms of both quality and performance thus far. The trend is expected to continue leading up to the PS5 Pro launch on November 7, 2024, and beyond.
Sony PSSR, NVIDIA DLSS & AMD FSR Compared
Based on Digital Foundry’s analysis, PSSR is currently better than AMD’s FSR upscaling technology at delivering a temporally stable image. FSR generally tends to suffer from a lot of dis-occlusion issues and aliasing whenever there’s motion on screen, which PSSR tends to handle much more gracefully, as the classic pattern of dis-occlusion fizzles is absent on Sony’s mid-gen console. The image looks more stable over multiple frames, even with the same base resolution here. Digital Foundry believes that, in most titles, the difference between FSR and PSSR will favor the latter, given the known issues with FSR since its Inception over 2 years ago.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s DLSS remains the gold standard for image reconstruction on PC, with very stable imagery across a wide range of game content. The results in The Last of Us Part One on PC are in line with that trend. In comparison to the top notch image quality of DLSS, PSSR tends to present a bit of extra image breakup on geometric edges and foliage. That said, it’s worth remembering that this is an early incarnation of PSSR, and Sony developers have confirmed to Digital Foundry that they’ve already seen substantial performance and quality improvements with the technology so far, and the trend is expected to continue.
