The PlayStation 5 Pro has been out in the wild for over a week now, and while it offers impressive improvements on many existing games, there are also some for which it seems to introduce new issues that make things look worse. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and the Silent Hill 2 remake are just a couple of games that new PS5 Pro owners and Digital Foundry analyses are finding issues with.
The PS5 Pro is supposed to offer additional graphics modes for enhanced games that allow them to run at a higher frame rates without sacrificing graphical detail, thanks in part to new PSSR upscaling technology. And that’s definitely the case across a host of first-party blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, as well as third-party exclusives like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Unfortunately, not every game is benefitting from its PS5 Pro update.
Digital Foundry’s breakdown of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s visuals on the new hardware found “problematic image quality issues” in the 60fps performance mode in particular. Part of the issue appears to be how foliage and the new ray-tracing feature interact to create a “strobing” effect that makes it look like bushes are shimmering. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was infamous for some launch-day visual issues as well, and many of its current problems on Pro appear to be related to a dynamic resolution that can dip as low as 720p.
When it comes to the Silent Hill 2 remake, the issue is that the PS5 Pro update still isn’t out and the game has weird shimmering problems in the meantime. Even without an official enhancement, the game should still look the same or slightly more stable thanks to the general boost from the console’s better specs. Instead, players have been complaining for a week now in hopes that a fix will get announced by Bloober Team. “I absolutely adore this game and I cannot stop playing it even though I want to,” wrote one player. “A PS5 Pro enhancement is absolutely necessary in this case. The game feels great but it looks like crap.”
So what’s the hang-up? While there’s no official word yet on what’s causing these problems and if it’s on the games’ end or related to something with the PS5 Pro itself, a current theory among some owners is that the problems are caused by games with base resolutions below 1080p that are being upscaled by the Pro’s PSSR technology. Games that have higher base resolutions seem to have less trouble with the upscaling.
“I think it maybe shows that devs…should not just blindly add PSSR to a game unless they really look at the subjective output and say ‘this is a great win,’” Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia said during a recent video. “Because if the current model cannot scale from a resolution this low and make it look good, they shouldn’t add it, right?” Currently, Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Alan Wake 2, which both run below 1080, also seem to have sub-optimal performance on PS5 Pro.
While there are dozens of games that are currently enhanced for PS5 Pro and not encountering these issues, as well as thousands more benefiting from the overall boost mode from the better hardware, it’s still a notable flaw for the console at launch, especially considering its hefty $700 price tag.