Gamers Think Some PlayStation 5 Titles Look Worse When Enhanced on the Pro

Talk about buyer’s remorse. PlayStation 5 Pro owners are reporting some Pro Enhanced games look worse than their base PlayStation 5 counterparts.

Video game website VGC has a nice roundup of complaints on these issues. There are two titles listed as “PS5 Pro Enhanced” on the PlayStation Store that are graphically inferior to the originals. They are the remake of Silent Hill 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

One look at the Silent Hill 2 Reddit page, and it is clear this is not an isolated incident. The Quality Mode, which grants a higher resolution and a 30 FPS cap on the base model PlayStation 5, does not double the frame rate to 60 FPS on a Pro. The 60 FPS Performance Mode, meanwhile, adds a shimmering effect on some of the environmental areas. Users posit this may be due to the PlayStation 5 Pro’s use of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technology. PSSR uses machine learning, which reinforces my belief that AI is not necessarily a good thing.

Issues with PSSR persist with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. In a video by Digital Foundry, Oliver Mackenzie showcases the same odd shimmering, stating, “If you look at this side-by-side, you can see just how unstable the game appears now with PSSR in the Performance mode. I would personally go as far as to say it looks dramatically worse than the old Performance mode here.”

The issue with machine learning is that a unique, non-repeating pattern has the capacity to confuse the AI. When it tries to upscale an environment, the results will be different with each frame, which produces the shimmer effect. Neither Sony, Konami, nor EA have even acknowledged the issue.

PlayStation 5 Pro owners are fed up with these flickering issues, and they have every right to be. How would you feel if you spent $700 on something advertised to be a graphical powerhouse, only to find some of your favorite games look worse than they did before? Between the ludicrous prices and lack of significant graphical upgrades, maybe the idea of console refreshes mid-generation was a mistake.