Doctor Hades
Member
That's fine if its not Pro patched, but why is it worse on the Pro? Did we ever experience anything like this with the PS4 Pro running unpatched games?
My recollection of the PS4 Pro is that enhanced games looked obviously better on my TV because they were targeting 1440p or higher rather than 1080p or lower. Remember this was a time before FSR upscaling and when other techniques such as 4K checkerboard rendering was used to "fake" the missing pixels to lesser (Red Dead Redemption 2) or greater (Horizon Zero Dawn) effect. This was also when we only got one mode, usually 30 fps but in some rare cases 60 fps versus 30 fps over the base system. It was much easier to see the improvements to the games and developers only had to update one PS4 mode with another single PS4 Pro mode.
Also, the PS4 Pro itself listed the patch notes and changes in the Game's Information so that just clarified what I was seeing. However, I do recall that not every PS4 Pro game ran better than the base system; there were a large number of games that actually ran worse as covered by Digital Foundry.
The PS5 games are already targeting 4K so the improvements to the games is far less obvious in games that already looked good on base PS5, e.g. Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, God of War: Ragnarok, Horizon: Forbidden West, etc. The biggest improvements seem to be to games that were not well-optimised in the first place (Dragon's Dogma 2, Elden Ring) or had sub-standard image quality in Performance mode (Final Fantasy VII Rebirth) where the PS5 Pro is basically a "band aid" for shoddy (mostly) third-party games. And, of course, we have additional RT which is nice but this means 30 fps and/or lower resolutions, which are less flattering when upscaled even with PSSR. PSSR, unfortunately, is not quite the saviour for poor IQ that I hoped it would be. It's good for games rendering at 1440p+ to 4K but we are still seeing a lot of Pro enhanced games running with sub-1440p and even sub-1080p resolutions that when upscaled to 4K have their own issues (texture flickering, shimmering, aliasing in motion), just like FSR. It's quite telling in my opinion that the two games with the best image quality by far on PS5 Pro are Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and Horizon Forbidden West, neither of which use PSSR.
I guess the reality is that as PS5 Pro owners we are effectively beta testing PSSR for Sony for the PS6 when I expect the technology will have improved in the same way DLSS did for NVIDIA. DLSS version 1.0 was pretty awful but it massively improved with version 2.0 onward.