Star Wars Jedi: Survivor gets a PSSR upgrade on PS5 Pro – and image quality is much improved

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.

There are still issues to address, however, tied more closely to PSSR’s ongoing evolution. We have to remind ourselves that PSSR is still a first generation product that will evolve and improve over time. The instability, break-up and noise problems stand in stark contrast to the older CNN version of Nvidia DLSS, for example, though in our head-to-head comparisons, PSSR does seem to present more sharply in motion.

We also took a look at the quality mode in the game, which targets 30fps and while the downgrade to frame-rate is obvious, the improvements to resolution make the 4K output from PSSR more convincing – though still some way short of the standard set by DLSS at a similar internal resolution. This mode generally looks fine – with no vignetting problems – though again, there are some issues such as ‘black holes’ in the ray-traced global illumination. This issue was there in the last patch, but it hasn’t been addressed and if anything, seems to present more frequently than it did before.

Ultimately, there’s the sense of general improvement – especially in the performance mode – and that’s good news. Jedi: Survivor is in reasonable shape overall now, even if we aren’t seeing the kind of night and day improvement over FSR 2 upscaling we were hoping for from PSSR when upscaling from lower pixel counts. This is clearly an ongoing project for Sony and we wonder how much the recently announced Amythest collaboration between PlayStation and AMD will yield benefits. We saw FSR 4 at CES 2025 and we were genuinely impressed with the Radeon team’s ‘AI Research Project’.

Beyond Jedi: Survivor, we’ve seen a number of games address their own PSSR problems by either reverting to other upscaling solutions (the Silent Hill 2 remake went back to Epic’s TSR for its performance mode) or offering the ability to choose between FSR and PSSR, as seen in Alan Wake 2, Avatar and Star Wars Outlaws. Will these – and other affected games – update with the latest version of PSSR? We’ll report back if they do.