A new DF Direct Weekly arrives today and it’s essentially two hours of myself, Oliver Mackenzie and Alex Battaglia revisiting the Mark Cerny reveal for PlayStation 5 Pro in the light of broadcast quality footage made available to the press after the event. It’s a chance to reassess the introduction of the new hardware by being able to actually see the difference, with the blurry haze of YouTube compression artefacts removed from the presentation. In the process, we’ve learned more about the games shown and have some initial opinions about PSSR – PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution – the new AI upscaling technology used by PS5 Pro. Think of it as Sony’s take on Nvidia’s game-changing DLSS.
Of course, we’ve made a YouTube video about it embedded on this page and by extension, the audience might be wondering how we can show you the games running well on this medium if prior YT presentations could not. Well, we’ve been doing this for some time now and recognise that there’s a limited amount of video bandwidth available – and you can get more from that bitrate budget by slowing footage down, freezing it and zooming it for extra clarity. This is particularly useful for users on mobile devices – well over half of our views the last time we looked and only growing in importance. Still not good enough for you? Well, this Direct and the Cerny presentation are available as pristine quality video downloads via the Digital Foundry Supporter Program.
The majority of titles seen in the Sony presentation last week are using PSSR upscaling and it turns out that ‘countable pixel edges’ – which we use to calculate internal rendering resolutions – are very easy to find, meaning we have a pretty firm lock on the details. It was somewhat disappointing to see newcomers to the DF Supporter Program share those details this weekend ahead of the show’s public release and with none of the surrounding, crucial context.
0:00:00 Introduction0:02:47 The Last of Us Part 20:11:49 Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart0:23:44 Alan Wake 20:33:27 Horizon Forbidden West0:39:09 Hogwarts Legacy0:45:48 Gran Turismo 70:54:35 Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Assassin’s Creed Shadows0:57:43 Could PS5 Pro run Elden Ring at 60fps?1:03:36 Is PS5 Pro a good deal relative to PC?1:16:48 Supporter Q1: With the Pro reaching $700, what will the PS6 look like?1:26:42 Supporter Q2: Could PSSR run on the base PS5?1:33:04 Supporter Q3: Why hasn’t Sony developed machine learning based frame gen tech for PS5 Pro?1:37:11 Supporter Q4: Will the high price of PS5 Pro drive people to PC?1:44:13 Supporter Q5: Will low PS5 Pro sales cause development problems?1:51:46 Supporter Q6: What game reveals would have excited you about PS5 Pro?
But hey – let’s give you those rendering resolutions and allow me to explain perhaps why the developers have made those choices and why it’s important to consider the overall presentation, not the internal pixel counts alone.
The Last of Us Part 2: The clip shown in the presentation operates at the same native 1440p rendering resolution as the performance mode in the standard PS5 game. However, PSSR is used instead of a more basic upscale, giving a presentation comparable with native 4K. Why didn’t Naughty Dog increase resolution? Well, PSSR has a computational cost on its own, while various elements such as post-processing are likely running at native 4K resolution.