Why Increase Res with PSSR2 - Why Not Lower It With More Features?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]Right, first question. This one's coming from Daro in brackets. Dan, I've noticed with a few recent and upcoming games, developers boasting about quote unquote increased internal resolutions on PS5 Pro, I immediately think to myself, surely we want the opposite now. It's packing a decent upscaler. Why does this keep happening? Could somebody make it stop? Um, as Capcom and our Capcom and Remedy, the only ones using PSSR correctly to drop the internal resolution. Um, Alex, interesting question here because it is essentially all about quantity of pixels versus quality of pixels. And the new PSSR kind of straddles the line between um delivering kind of uh both, you know, a reduction in pixels, which means you can put more GPU power into each pixel, and the upscaler is doing a pretty good job.

[00:00:49]>> Yeah. So the the what Dan is referencing here is the fact that with a scaler like PSSR 2 or FSR 4 or DLSS4 um you don't need a lot of internal resolution to get good anti-aliasing and upscale on most rasterized screen elements. Um, and as a result, you don't need like like previous upscalers like FSR or TS sometimes TSR depending upon the game. You know, maybe you'd be looking for like 1440p and above or like old TAUs, you'd want to be higher than that at 4K. Maybe even to get a 4K approximation that looks great. Um, so you don't need such in great internal resolution.

[00:01:36]uh games that are boosting something like 1440p internal and then using PSSR on top of it. It's arguably wasting a bit of resolution there and performance that could be used for other things like uh increasing ray tracing samples, turning on one extra ray tracing effect, etc. Um and so I'd agree with Dan there to a limit. I would argue that um the like when I play with DLSS on PC for the most part I actually try and impose a kind of performance limit there. I say like I really want to just be using what is performance mode at 4K for the most part. I could, of course, go under and I'd still get great um edge and quality and detail in most surfaces, but as soon as you get less than 1/4 the quality of internal resolution there, since other effects are scaling with resolution as well, you start getting knockons that I'd say are less than positive and they become more and more obvious over time.

[00:02:41]So if you have stuff like post-processing that doesn't scale with the output resolution or some other internal effect or ray tracing which doesn't which it shouldn't probably uh then you can start seeing stuff like certain edges that are affected only by ray tracing or certain insurface detail that is affected by ray tracing starts looking really low res and maybe sparkly and other things. So, I think Remedy gets off with it pretty well here in their game, uh, in the performance mode, which is targeting 60 fps, but I'd say Capcom actually has a little bit more issues at its lower internal resolution there, mainly due to the the what happens to the quality of RA trace reflections in a game like Pragana. So, I'd say there are limits. Uh, and um, it's cool that it works at all. uh unlike it wouldn't work with FSR, but I'd still think you'd maybe want to balance that a little differently personally. Yeah.

[00:03:38]>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm inclined to agree. Um Oliver, you've basically tested anything and everything on the PlayStation 5 Professional PSSR related.

[00:03:48]Uh what do you make of this?

[00:03:50]Well, I don't think there's one correct or incorrect way to do this because if you've got nothing else to do with the extra GPU power in PS5 Pro outside of implementing PSSR and maybe you tweak one or two settings, but you're kind of going into placebo level settings adjustments when you're going going into things like, you know, adjusting shadow resolution slightly or adjusting the SSR resolve slightly. I kind of feel like just bumping up internal resolution is one obvious area you could go perhaps the obvious area where you could go. And I think this uh person is is referencing the fact that um I believe for Saros Sony is advertising that it has an increased internal resolution on PS5 Pro. Of course, they aren't specifying what that is. We'll have to find out ourselves when we take a look at that game. But yeah, I just feel like this is just one of those areas where you can easily deploy GPU power. So, it makes sense that you'd put GPU power there.

[00:04:38]But at the same time, I am in complete agreement that, you know, these more aggressive upscale factors like 864p to 4K, which is what we're seeing in Pragmata and Alano 2, that can look very very good, especially at normal viewing distance with PSSR, it's awfully good, I think. And uh I don't really think in a lot of titles, especially rasterized titles, primarily rasterized titles that don't have super noisy rate tracing or rate tracing that again is dependent on resolution to resolve and look correct. Um I kind of think that it's fine to just do a 64p in many cases to 4K. I mean, it's going to depend on the game, but like what we see in Aleno 2 is remarkably clean, clear, good texture detail, great stability, no ghosting really, no like all the visual gremlins we complain about usually aren't really there. So why not just go with the more aggressive upscale? To me though, I think with PSSR, you you don't want to just like dial in a low resolution arbitrarily or even take high frame rates or whatever. I think you want to target like a fixed refresh like let's say 60 fps and then dial in additional meaningful effects and while dialing down resolution like adding additional rate tracing into the mix. I think that's what squares the circle kind of squares the circle and makes it make sense. But if you don't have anything else to do, I don't really begrudge people for just bumping up internal res because what else are you going to do if you don't have like meaningful effects to stack on top of that, right?

[00:05:56]>> Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. So, my general thoughts on this fairly straightforward.

[00:06:00]Um, I'm all in on like lower resolutions if it frees up more GPU resources for better quality visuals, right? And especially raid facing. Um, I do think though there is an issue with um obviously we don't have ray regeneration on the PlayStation 5 Pro. we don't have ray re reconstruction and um I think that's sort of like a key component that's the next thing I'd like to see added. Uh but at the same time I'm a bit concerned that ray regeneration on the AMD side doesn't seem to be like a holistic solution that includes upscaling. Meanwhile, on the PC side of things, um we don't seem to have had much movement recently with uh ray reconstruction in terms of like new models for that. And um we've also got the bizarre situation of like uh games only allowing ray regenerate, sorry, ray reconstruction on um path tracing games for that. That's not that's not what it's supposed to be for exclusively, right? I think you'll agree there, Alex.

[00:06:55]I mean, if if if a game supports RA um uh RA uh reconstruction, why would you restrict it just to path tracing when it can do an excellent job on on raid tracing as well? Doesn't make sense to me.

[00:07:07]>> Yeah, for that I I agree with you. And I think one of the few reasons why it is the case is just the extra QA time and the you know like you need to have like a certain setup for it to work well and then you'd have to essentially add an extra mode for it and all the work that would mean. So, I think it is about saving time at work, which is money.

[00:07:27]>> Yeah. But, you know, I'd say get used to those 864ps even moving into next gen.

[00:07:33]>> Oh, definitely. Especially if there is some sort of like ray regeneration on the next, you know, PlayStation console.

[00:07:39]>> It's almost certainly going to happen.