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DF Weekly: Avatar is the latest PS5 Pro patch that looks worse than the base PS5 game
Digital Foundry addresses the bizarre trend to PlayStation 5 Pro upgrades that can look arguably worse than the standard PS5 version.
www.eurogamer.net
In this week's DF Direct Weekly, we talk about the mooted PlayStation handheld (spoilers: it won't run native PS5 games) but it's our second news topic of the week I'll be writing about in more depth today. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has arrived on PlayStation 5 Pro and its spec points look impressive - you're getting the quality mode visuals of the base console version at 60fps. There's just one problem: the Pro version looks a lot worse than the standard console's quality mode and even its performance mode has some quality advantages over the Pro version. In which case, what's the point?
We should expect to see some outlier software with the arrival of any enhanced console - games that aren't quite delivering what they should. In fact, we saw it with the launch of PlayStation 4 Pro back in 2016. If memory serves, The Last of Us Remastered could run at a lower frame-rate on Pro than it did on the base PS4 - and Watch Dogs 2 also had similar issues. However, these were generally exceptions and were quickly patched. While the quality of Pro versions could vary dramatically, a noticeably worse image wasn't the issue - and yet, this is clearly happening with PS5 Pro. So many titles are affected now that many users are asking for the ability to run PS5 Pro-enabled games without the Pro features enabled. Instead, those games would run with standard model features, with only the extra CPU and GPU horsepower of the new console in use.
My personal feeling on this is that it's a short term "solution" of sorts to a problem that will likely be resolved in the medium term, but to understand the problem is to focus on Sony's machine learning-based upscaling solution: PlayStation Spectral Resolution, or PSSR. This is essentially the PlayStation team's answer to Nvidia DLSS or Intel XeSS, where game engine inputs and a lower resolution are fed into a neural network, delivering an upscaled output fit for a 4K screen.
Right now, the sense is that PSSR can be as detrimental to a game's presentation as it can be a boon - and that's a problem when you're selling an expensive enhanced console upgrade to the most dedicated fans in your userbase. The quality bar is very, very straightforward: a Pro-enhanced game cannot and should not ship if it's worse than the output of the standard model. In terms of quantifiable metrics, frame-rate shouldn't be lower and to be fair, we've not seen anything like that from Pro software so far. However, things are trickier when dealing with image quality where it's typically a more subjective appraisal. That said, Avatar is losing so much detail owing to PSSR 'noise' that a cursory A to B comparison should do the trick. Foliage (Jedi: Survivor) or RTAO (Dragon's Dogma 2) shouldn't be flickering noticeably when it does not do so on the original PS5. At some point the question needs to be asked: can't developers see what's going wrong here?
There has been some tacit recognition that PSSR isn't the complete solution right now and should perhaps be deployed more sparingly. Guerrilla Games didn't use it for its Horizon games and has delivered what we think is the best image quality we've seen in any console game. Both Santa Monica Studio and Polyphony Digital have delivered good PSSR support, but even then, have included the option to drop back to prior upscaling solutions. Meanwhile, with Fortnite on PS5 Pro, Epic has chosen to retain its own TSR upscaler - a technology deeply embedded and integrated with Unreal Engine 5.
The obvious conclusion is that Epic didn't feel PSSR is a good fit for UE5 right now - born out with the UE5-driven Silent Hill 2, where Bloober Team's swap back to TSR for its performance mode has ironed out its image quality issues. And yet, PSSR remains in the 30fps quality offering, which despite the higher resolution arguably looks worse overall than the 60fps performance alternative.
As mentioned earlier, a possible solution is to offer a system-level 'opt out' of Pro upgrades and allow for Game Boost to operate on the standard PS5 version of the game - and such an option is said to exist on development Pro hardware. However, introducing a kind of fallback solution to mitigate failed Pro upgrades sends the wrong message when it's down to developers, publishers and the platform holder to get it right with their software.