Konami and Bloober Team’s critically acclaimed remake of Silent Hill 2 is experiencing graphical and performance issues on the PS5 Pro from its latest patch. According to the in-depth analysis from Digital Foundry’s own Thomas Morgan, the latest patch 1.05 of Silent Hill 2 presents a huge issue with the game using the PS5 Pro’s PSSR feature on both fidelity and performance modes.
Image quality suffers due to the poor implementation of the PS5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling feature. The PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or the PSSR in short, is an AI-based upscaling method that takes a lot of inspiration from Nvidia’s own Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).
Bloober Team is aware of the issue and said the team is already ‘working on it.”
Silent Hill 2 suffers from the issues that PSSR presents when it’s not implemented properly. “More visual noise, flicker, and temporal instability in movement,” Thomas wrote in his article.
“Most notably, walking around Silent Hill’s streets, PSSR breaks the stability of the game’s Lumen reflections and GI. On the 60fps performance mode, world reflections in puddles now jitter from left to right, with no anti-aliasing to disguise their pixellation,” Thomas continued.
PSSR upscales the game’s lower resolution to your monitor or TV’s output resolution, achieving the best image quality without hindering the hardware’s overall performance and thus giving more headroom to put additional quirks like ray-tracing and the like. This method also gives you a smoother overall experience. However, it’s not perfect. Since this method uses artificial intelligence to predict where the player is facing, it calculates and balances performance between resolutions to achieve better frames generated and visual quality. Unfortunately, even if it uses the most advanced AI technology, some downsides can’t be avoided.
Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor also suffers the same PSSR issues as Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. PSSR is still a new feature and we’re hoping developers will work closely with Sony to properly implement its proprietary AI-based upscaler.
