After some impressive updates to PS5 Pro games with the implementation of PSSR's machine learning-based enhancement, post-launch issues began to emerge and several games we tested showed some serious issues. The biggest of these was Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, where RT's updates were so marred by strobing foliage that we had no idea how the patch escaped QA.
Other affected games have since added FSR toggles or reverted to standard buffing, but Jedi: Survivor is intriguing because a different approach has been taken. Developer Respawn says it has deployed the latest version of PSSR and after reviewing the latest patch, we can confirm that there are genuine improvements.
Looking at the performance mode first, the pulsing and strobing effects are much improved, and mostly gone. The notorious river course, which previously looked quite disastrous, now appears much cleaner and there is some suggestion that Respawn has gone some extra mile to whip this area into shape. While there are improvements, some PSSR issues remain, with persistent noise in opaque geometry, while interestingly, an unwanted vignetting effect is now present at the edge of the screen.
However, the improvements are clear and appear to be due to PSSR and other adjustments on the part of the developer. One way to improve quality would have been to increase the resolution, but in our tests the pixel count remains largely the same and performance remains solid, so there has been no “brute force” attempt to increase quality. that way.
However, there are still issues to be addressed that are more closely related to the current evolution of PSSR. We have to remind ourselves that PSSR is still a first generation product that will evolve and improve over time. The jitter, tearing, and noise issues are in stark contrast to the previous CNN version of Nvidia DLSS, for example, although in our direct comparisons, PSSR seems to present itself more clearly in motion.
We also take a look at the game's Quality mode, which targets 30fps, and while the drop to frame rate is obvious, the improvements in resolution make PSSR's 4K output more convincing, although it's still a bit off. slightly below the standard set by DLSS with a similar internal resolution. This mode generally looks good, with no vignetting issues, although again, there are some issues like “black holes” in ray tracing global illumination. This issue appeared in the latest patch, but has not been fixed and, if anything, seems to occur more frequently than before.
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Ultimately, there is a sense of overall improvement, especially in performance mode, and that's good news. Jedi: Survivor is in reasonable shape overall now, even if we're not seeing the kind of day and night improvement over FSR 2's improvement that we expected from PSSR when improving from lower pixel counts. This is clearly an ongoing project for Sony and we wonder how much benefit the recently announced Amythest collaboration between PlayStation and AMD will produce. We saw FSR 4 at CES 2025 and were really impressed with the Radeon team's 'AI Research Project'.
Beyond Jedi: Survivor, we've seen several games address their own PSSR issues by turning to other enhancement solutions (the Silent Hill 2 remake returned to Epic's TSR for its performance mode) or offering the ability to choose between FSR and PSSR, as seen in Alan Wake 2, Avatar and Star Wars Outlaws. Will these and other affected games be updated with the latest version of PSSR? We will inform you if they do.