PS5 Pro owners complain that some Pro-enhanced games look worse

Some PlayStation 5 Pro owners have been reporting that certain games actually look worse on the console.

Reports are suggesting that Silent Hill 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – two games that are marked as ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ on the PlayStation Store – actually perform worse in their enhanced versions than they did on the base PS5 console.

Players on the Silent Hill 2 Reddit page have been complaining for more than a week that even though the game is apparently PS5 Pro Enhanced, it still has options for Quality and Performance graphics options.

It’s claimed that Quality mode still runs at 30 frames per second with no noticeable improvement, while Performance mode now has an odd shimmering effect on some surfaces.

It’s been suggested that the shimmering may be a result of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technology used by the PS5 Pro, and that it’s working incorrectly with this particular game.

One video shows the player switching to Performance mode mid-game, which immediately makes the shimmering effect appear, most notably on the puddles and trees.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor appears to be another victim of PSSR, with Digital Foundry publishing a video which claims the PS5 Pro version has “severe image quality problems”.

Showing a side-by-side video of the game running in Performance mode on PS5 and PS5 Pro, Digital Foundry notes clear shimmering present in the latter.

“If you look at this side-by-side, you can see just how unstable the game appears now with PSSR in the Performance mode,” Digital Foundry’s Oliver Mackenzie says in the video. “I would personally go as far as to say it looks dramatically worse than the old Performance mode here.”

Mackenzie notes that Jedi: Survivor had numerous patches before the release of PS5 Pro, and that it had reached a point where its Performance mode was “not that offensive looking – it was basically not too bad, it was basically okay, especially from a normal viewing distance on a large television.”

Mackenzie suggested that the issue is almost certainly down to the way PSSR upscales the image. Like other upscaling algorithms, PSSR takes a game’s existing rendered image and uses machine learning to attempt to fill in the missing details and present the game at a higher resolution.

The issue with this is that if the rendered image has a low level of detail, or something with an intricate, non-repeating pattern which could confuse the AI upscaler – such as a road surface or foliage – the upscaled results could be different in each frame, resulting in the shimmering effect.

It’s not yet clear whether these issues will be patched, or whether the problem has to be fixed at a game level or a system level – Silent Hill 2 players on the game’s Reddit page are becoming impatient at the apparent lack of acknowledgement from Konami or Sony on the issue.

“I am totally fine if a patch or fix for the extremely obvious Pro issues is not ready, or is perhaps weeks away even,” user Time-did-Reverse wrote. “I’m not unreasonable and expecting immediate fixes on a new console.

“But I think what is reasonable to be irked about is the total lack of communication from both Sony and Bloober Team regarding 1) Acknowledgment of issues, 2) Acknowledgment that said issues are being reviewed / addressed, 3) If known, some form of ETA on addressing the issues and 4) Making it clear whether this game is currently ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ as the tag says on the store.”