PS5 Pro's PSSR upscaler tested against FSR 3.1 and Nvidia DLSS 3.7 in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

With PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony has joined the machine-learning based image reconstruction race started by Nvidia almost six years ago. At Digital Foundry, we’re excited to see this kind of technology reach into the console space and so as part of our recent exclusive PS5 Pro capture opportunity, we spent some time using PS5 Pro and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart to grab a series of reconstruction-based shots that we know from prior experience truly puts reconstruction technologies through their paces. To what extent can PSSR best the FSR-level technology typically used by consoles? And how close is PSSR to the acknowledged state-of-the-art: Nvidia DLSS?

First of all, let’s discuss caveats and limitations. We compared PS5 Pro to PC on approximate quality settings, but it’s impossible to get a complete match. Secondly, Rift Apart uses dynamic resolution scaling and the PC implementation is very, very different – so we pixel-counted each individual test shot on the Pro, then matched resolution precisely on DLSS using a tool called DLSSTweaks, whereas we were limited to FSR 3.1’s quality mode, which typically uses a slightly lower base resolution than the Pro. Beyond that, while we tried to disable motion blur on PS5 Pro for increased clarity, turning it off only seems to lower the intensity of the effect, so we had to match that on our PC captures.

Finally – and perhaps the biggest caveat of all – this is just one game and the quality of upscaling implementations vary from title to title. We’ve not seen enough of PSSR to draw more solid conclusions in the way we can with FSR and DLSS, but there’s a good chance that what we’re seeing here with PSSR may be indicative. For now though, it’s very much just a Ratchet and Clank head-to-head.

I’d strongly recommend watching the video above as the very nature of the exercise means that video is a better medium to communicate the differences, and as you’ll see when you watch, comparisons up against FSR 3.1 were the first order of business. AMD’s compute-based upscaler is heavily used in the console space and in many scenarios, this is the technology PSSR looks to supplant. I began by looking for ‘disocclusion fizzle’. A third-person game like Rift Apart is great for testing this: it’s essentially the quality of newly revealed detail which has little to no ‘history’ to draw on from previous frames.