There was drama among gaming enthusiasts this weekend when a paywalled Digital Foundry analysis of some early PS5 Pro footage attached some lower than expected resolutions to titles like Alan Wake 2. We’re going to refrain from sharing the information here, primarily because it’s not publicly available – and also because we feel it’s lacking context.
However, the subsequent headlines and forum posts prompted Remedy’s head of communications Thomas Puha to comment: “Remedy’s games and resolution discussion pops up every once in a while,” he wrote on ResetEra. “Image quality matters more than resolution, not that I’m confirming anything. We'll drop some details on the PS5 Pro version of Alan Wake 2 in the coming weeks with some assets too. I think the version will be a pleasant surprise, but hard to tell these days.”
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One of the tentpole features of the PS5 Pro is its inclusion of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (or PSSR), a proprietary technology similar to Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (or DLSS) which utilises AI to reconstruct an image from a lower resolution. This effectively enables lower internal resolutions to be upscaled to a higher resolution, with very little artefacting or inaccuracies.
What this means is that developers can use more computational power on things like physics and lighting, because they can render their games at a lower resolution and rely on the upscaler to deliver a clean 4K image. We’ll obviously need more real-world examples of PSSR in action before we can comment on its quality, but this may be the reason you could see some lower than expected resolutions attached to the PS5 Pro versions of games.
As the Editor of Push Square, Sammy has over 15 years of experience analysing the world of PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5 and everything in between. He’s an expert on PS Studios and industry matters, as well as sports games and simulators. He also enjoys RPGs when he has the time to dedicate to
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