DF Weekly: Silent Hill 2 patched on PS5 Pro – and PSSR is gone from the performance mode

The arrival of a new working week can be pretty bleak, but hey – at least you have a brand new edition of DF Direct Weekly to watch or listen to. Despite the colossal workload we have, there’s a huge amount of discussion this week – from an extended chat about the strengths and weaknesses of Sony’s PSSR upscaling through to a look at Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s 60fps patch and some quick impressions on the new PlayStation Portal update.

This Direct is longer than usual, because Bloober Team released a patch for Silent Hill 2 on PS5 Pro after filming, aimed at improving graphical problems – described in depth in Tom Morgan’s coverage last week. So, has the game improved? The answer is yes, but it seems that the route forward was simply to roll back on PSSR support, dropping back to Epic’s TSR upscaler – in the 60fps mode at least. PSSR remains in effect in the 30fps quality mode, so that’s still presenting some issues.

Let’s recap on the issues as they stood with patch 1.05. In providing Pro support, Bloober Team shifted from the use of Epic’s ‘in house’ upscaling solution – TSR (temporal super resolution) in favour of Sony’s machine learning based alternative, PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution). In image quality terms, while PSSR has some advantages, they were significantly outweighed by the negatives – intrusive flickering in Lumen reflections, inconsistent global illumination and general ‘noise’ problems. Disocclusion issues were also problematic, with objects noticeably leaving visual artefacts when the camera moved. We went as far as to say that the Pro version of Silent Hill 2 looked worse than the standard PS5 version as a consequence.

0:00:00 Introduction0:01:05 News 1: PS5 Pro PSSR issues analyzed0:29:50 News 2: Silent Hill 2 patch tested: PSSR dropped!0:39:02 News 3: STALKER 2 suffers launch woes0:51:04 News 4: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate gets current-gen patch1:02:23 News 5: Sony in talks to acquire From Software1:12:34 News 6: PlayStation Portal updated with cloud streaming support1:22:57 News 7: Callisto Protocol PS5 Pro patch released!1:32:36 Supporter Q1: Are there any Nvidia graphics cards for $400 or less that are good deals?1:42:29 Supporter Q2: When there are glaring performance issues in a game, what do you chalk them up to?1:50:24 Supporter Q3: Why do games often offer so many console modes when one of them is clearly optimal?1:57:13 Supporter Q4: Are you feeling Unreal Engine 5 fatigue?2:01:29 Supporter Q5: Will Microsoft bring Xbox backwards compatibility to PC?2:10:39 Supporter Q6: Which vaporware is better: Blast Processing or “the power of the cloud”?

Bloober Team’s solution for this problem is pretty straightforward – to roll back on the PSSR support in the lower resolution performance mode, re-introducing TSR. In using this strategy, the game now reverts to the kind of image quality seen on the standard PlayStation 5 version of the game – and that’s absolutely fine. We can’t rule out dynamic resolution but it seems that performance mode is upscaling from something in the region of 1008p. There is a small frame-rate advantage over the standard PlayStation 5 rendition of the game, but it’s not as big as expected – just a few fps higher. Perhaps this is explained by the standard PS5 running at 900p, with Pro operating with an improved pixel count.