PS5 Pro Digital Foundry Hands-on Delivers First Impression on PSSR, Ray Tracing Improvements and More

Digital Foundry checked out the upcoming PS5 Pro console at a recent preview event and came back with an hour-long video to discuss their first impressions (with some excerpts of game developer interviews sprinkled in) and show off some new footage from various games.

F1 24: Besides DDGI (Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination), Codemasters has added three ray-traced effects for ambient occlusion, transparency, and opaque reflections. Moreover, anisotropic filtering has improved. According to DF's Oliver Mackenzie, these additions translate almost into a generational leap in visuals in some instances. However, image stability in this RT mode isn't as stable as in the base PS5 Quality mode, probably due to a combination of PSSR and the noise caused by the ray-traced effects. PSSR will be added to other modes in the future.

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Gran Turismo 7: Polyphony Digital's latest game offers two PS5 Pro modes. One, as mentioned in the other report posted earlier today, adds real-time ray-traced reflections during races. However, GT7 has a more limited ray tracing implementation than F1 24, with off-track elements and even some on-track elements not being factored in the reflections. Image quality and stability also suffer a bit in this RT mode compared to the base PS5. For those players who aren't interested in the ray-traced reflections, there is an image quality priority mode that uses PSSR and looks very clean in comparison.

Horizon Forbidden West: This one is interesting. Guerrilla Games confirmed that it uses a new anti-aliasing reconstruction technique originally developed for future games but was then ported back to the second installment in the Horizon series. It's not PSSR or checkerboard, but Digital Foundry was very impressed as it looked way more detailed and stable than the previous solution included with the game. There will be a Quality mode that renders more often at 4K or near-4K resolution, but the