After some impressive upgrades to PS5 Pro games with the implementation of PSSR machine learning-based upscaling, post-launch issues started to emerge and several games we tested exhibited some serious issues. Foremost amongst them was Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, where RT upgrades were marred by foliage strobing so bad, we had no idea how the patch escaped quality control.
Other affected games have since added FSR toggles or reverted to standard upscaling, but Jedi: Survivor is intriguing in that a different approach has been taken. Developer Respawn says it has implemented the latest version of PSSR and having reviewed the latest patch, we can confirm that there are genuine improvements.
Looking at the performance mode first, the pulsing and strobing effects are much, much improved – and mostly gone. The notorious river run, which previously looked pretty disastrous, now presents much more cleanly and there is some suggestion that Respawn has put in additional effort to get this area into shape. While there are improvements, some PSSR issues persist, with a persistent noise on opaque geometry, while bizarrely, an unwanted vignetting effect is now present on the edge of the screen.
The improvements are clear, however, and do seem to be down to PSSR and further tweaks from the developer. One route forward for boosting quality would have been to increase resolution, but in our tests, the pixel counts remain much the same and performance is still solid – so there hasn’t been a ‘brute force’ attempt to increase quality in that way.