The PlayStation 5 Pro Horizon Forbidden West patch introduces an image treatment solution that delivers better image quality from what we have seen so far of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaler.
During the latest episode of their weekly podcast, the tech experts at Digital Foundry discussed this new image treatment solution, saying that it delivers a pristine image quality that is close to what NVIDIA DLSS can deliver on PC and considerably better than what we have seen PSSR do so far. This solution, which is reportedly in development for Guerrilla Games’ next project, is likely a compute-based solution that doesn’t use the machine learning hardware of the PlayStation 5 Pro, so it could potentially run on the base console, where it could deliver much more impressive results, considering the only upscaler available on the regular PS5 is AMD FSR, which delivers some middling results, as we have seen over and over in the past few months.
Although the great image quality delivered by this image treatment solution could be thanks to the high base resolution (1440p / 1584p to 4K), it could also be another great option for developers, as it could allow Guerrilla or any other developer using the Decima engine, like Kojima Productions with Death Stranding 2, to use the PlayStation 5 Pro machine learning hardware to do other things.
The superior image quality delivered by Horizon Forbidden West on PlayStation 5 Pro, thanks to this new image treatment solution, could be matched by any other game using PSSR with a high enough base resolution, as the games using the upscaler seen so far had a much lower base resolution than 1440p. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait much longer to see for ourselves what the AI-powered upscaler will be able to do under the right conditions, as the console launches next week, on November 7th, worldwide.
