PS5 Pro's PSSR PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution faces growing pains in specific games

PlayStation's new image-upscaling AI tech isn't without its flaws and limitations, and some games actually end up looking worse having utilized it.

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The $700 PlayStation 5 Pro owes its high-end performance to two main upgrades: The new beefed-up GPU, and PlayStation Spectral Resolution Scaling, or PSSR. So what is PSSR? It's basically Sony's own proprietary version of NVIDIA's DLSS AI-driven upscaling technology. Sony worked with AMD to engineer custom machine learning hardware onto the PS5 Pro's SoC, and has trained PSSR's AI on its first-party games.

"And finally, we added custom hardware for machine learning, and an AI library called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. PSSR analyzes the game's images pixel by pixel, and can add an extraordinary amount of detail which boosts the effect of resolution for the games," PS5 Pro architect Mark Cerny said in the console's technical reveal showcase.

The real-world results of PSSR can be mixed. Sony's own titles can benefit tremendously from PSSR, with Gran Turismo 7 even having an 8K mode on PlayStation 5 Pro. The benefits of PSSR--boosted frame rates without a noticeable knock to visuals--aren't automatic and require manual patches from developers.

Some games, like Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, don't play too nicely with PSSR. In a recent video, Digital Foundry outlines some of the limitations of the PS5 Pro's PSSR upscaler while giving reasons on why it may be the case.

"PSSR is just not acquitting itself in lower resolutions with titles that have raytraced-based lighting effects. Which makes sense, I think, because if Sony was internally training this on their own games, not a lot of their own games use raytraced-based lighting," Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia said in the video.

Star Wars Outlaws also had some noticeable visual static on PS5 Pro as well.

These issues are an interesting footnote in Sony's mid-gen journey. The PS5 Pro is essentially the bridge between the Gen9 and Gen10 PS5 and PS6 console generations. The PlayStation 6 will undoubtedly utilize a more refined and upgraded form of PSSR, and this is an early form of the technology that developers are still getting used to utilizing in their games.

Sony is committed to continually iterating PSSR over time and the AI library will grow as it analyzes more games, and as developers get better used to the PlayStation 5 Pro.