Games like Silent Hill 2 and Star Wars Outlaws are running worse on PS5 Pro than they do on the original consoles, much to players’ annoyance.
While many have balked at the whopping £700 price tag for the PlayStation 5 Pro, the console was always meant to target a niche audience, eager to play games on the most powerful hardware possible.
In fact, Sony has claimed the high price hasn’t been detrimental to the PS5 Pro’s sales, as it’s surpassed the launch of the PS4 Pro. Although some retailers have already begun offering price cuts less than two weeks after its release, which is odd.
Despite plenty of positive buzz from some PS5 Pro owners, complaints have since arisen regarding how certain games look and perform on the console.
Looking through social media sites and forums, players have reported visual issues, namely shimmering and aliasing, that risk making games look worse than they did on the base PlayStation 5.
To an untrained eye, these sorts of issues can sometimes be unnoticeable, but for those who pay extreme attention to graphical quality (i.e. typical PS5 Pro owners) shimmering and aliasing can be distracting and an outright deal breaker.
Which PS5 Pro games have visual issues?
The good news is these issues aren’t universal and only seem to occur in select games. The Silent Hill 2 remake looks to be the most egregious example based on this Reddit thread, which shares a screenshot of several X complaints directed at Konami.
One X user, heavensnightxx, posted a short clip of the game in performance mode and the shimmering is pretty blatant, especially when the camera focuses on a puddle of water.
What is aliasing?
Have you ever played a game and noticed jagged lines around a character or part of the environment? That’s what people refer to as aliasing. Since your TV or computer monitor displays things in pixels, it can’t display truly smooth or curved lines, making aliasing more noticeable at lower resolutions.
With higher resolutions or anti-aliasing options, the jagged lines can be made to seem smoother, which is how you get crisper and more detailed graphics.
‘I immediately knew something was off without even seeing gameplay previously or even playing the game before this. That’s how bad this is,’ writes Unlucky-Soil-2456 on Reddit, ‘I can’t even bring myself to play it in this state because it’s so distracting.’
There are similar Reddit threads for Alan Wake 2, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Star Wars Outlaws, with the latter including a clip of the planet Akiva, which features not only flickering visuals but some foliage popping in and out of existence.
On YouTube, one PS5 Pro owner uploaded footage of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 and even we can spot the distracting flurry of white dots that appear every time the camera moves. In the comments, the uploader, ChaysticPlays, adds this only happens when playing at 60Hz and isn’t a problem at 120Hz.
The prevailing theory is that these issues stem from the PS5 Pro’s PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) technology, which makes use of AI upscaling to improve the resolution and allow for better graphical fidelity.
With any luck, these issues can be resolved with patches but, in the meantime, disgruntled players will either need to deal with them or swap to quality mode, which caps games at 30 frames per second.
Although you’d think with the improved hardware, PlayStation 5 owners would no longer be forced to choose between better graphics and smoother frame rates.
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