According to Gergő Horváth, this half-generation update is not as big as the PlayStation 4 Pro revealed compared to the base PlayStation 4.
Gaijin Entertainment immediately added PlayStation 5 Pro support to two of its games at launch. One is Enlisted (a World War II multiplayer tactical first-person shooter), originally released in 2020, and the other is War Thunder (vehicular combat, also a multiplayer title), which launched in 2013 and has been updated ever since.
Gergő Horváth is one of the graphics programmers of Gaijin’s proprietary Dagor engine, a position he has held for four years. According to him, the PlayStation 5 Pro hasn’t made the same leap forward as the PlayStation 4 Pro did against the PlayStation 4, but the console will reach its goal because of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which he says is on par with Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS, while surpassing AMD’s FSR!
“While the ~45% faster rendering is impressive on its own, the real game changer in my opinion is the addition of the machine learning architecture that makes PSSR possible. By being able to render at lower resolutions while maintaining the same visual fidelity, we can free up a tremendous amount of resources. This technology will be especially useful when paired with raytracing. I’d say the difference between the PlayStation 5 Pro and the PlayStation 5 is less significant than the difference between the last-gen console and its Pro counterpart. In the PlayStation 5 Pro, we have little to no change in CPU performance, and while the GPU has gotten a nice boost, the difference is much less significant: the PlayStation 4 Pro had more than double the nominal performance of its predecessor’s GPU (in terms of TFLOPS).
However, back then the goal was to achieve 4K gaming. This time, it looks like the focus was on providing much better ray tracing. In both cases, the goal is achieved. It’s always up to gamers to decide whether the price of a console meets their expectations or not. Calculating a “fair price” by evaluating the hardware alone does not make much sense, as gamers usually make their decision based on the new experiences a device offers, not just the hardware,” Horváth said.
He also talked about how Enlisted and War Thunder are more visible on the PlayStation 5 Pro: “For the PlayStation 5 Pro release of Enlisted, we switched from a fixed resolution to using dynamic resolution along with upscaling techniques for both the base and Pro versions of the console to ensure that we always have a stable frame rate while the internal rendering resolution is automatically adjusted. This made 4K@120FPS gaming possible for PlayStation 5 Pro gamers. On the PlayStation 5 Pro, this means a higher rendering resolution, which results in more detailed and sharper visuals. With the faster memory, we were able to use higher resolution textures and better looking global illumination, which together enhance detail even more.
Upscaling from the internal rendering resolution to the display resolution is done by our own TAAU implementation for the base PlayStation 5, but we use PSSR for the PlayStation 5 Pro version. PSSR does a better job, of course. For the PlayStation 5 Pro release of War Thunder, we’ll be offering the ability to play the game at 4K@120FPS from day one. More visual updates will follow with the next major update release in a week, and more are in development,” Horváth added.
Finally, he talked about how Enlisted and PSSR work together: “We are currently using PSSR in Enlisted. During development and playtesting, we’ve found it to be on par with Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS, the other two machine learning based super resolution methods. While in my opinion PSSR produces less blur, ghosting and unwanted flicker compared to AMD FSR. These technologies are constantly improving, so I find it impressive that the first version of PSSR is already on par with other more mature solutions. On the PlayStation 5 Pro, we are about 75% of the way through Enlisted. We’ll give our estimate for War Thunder later, when we have all of our visual updates implemented,” Horváth said.
So not everyone fell flat on their face with Thursday’s console release!
Source: WCCFTech
