Silent Hill 2 Remake is a perfect candidate for a PlayStation 5 Pro upgrade. A month after its October release, frame-rate drops still detract from the base PS5 experience – in both its 60fps performance and 30fps quality modes – all of which makes the prospect of new hardware fixing the issue rather compelling. There’s an air of mystery surrounding this PS5 Pro upgrade, though. Developer Bloober Team makes no explicit mention of Pro support in its patch notes and all we have to go on is a brief note on the PlayStation Store that it has a Pro patch. Still, booting the game it’s clear that a PS5 Pro upgrade is indeed in place, as stealthy as it is. There’s a boost in frame-rate on both modes – quality and performance – that allows for a more stable 30 and 60 frames per second. Plus, Sony’s PSSR upscaling is now used on PS5 Pro, replacing the TSR upscaling method of the base console. The problem is that there are some glaring image stability issues not found on the standard PlayStation 5 – and this looks to be another game with a troubled PSSR upscaling implementation.
With the latest patch 1.05 installed, the use of PSSR in Silent Hill 2 Remake appears to introduce issues on PS5 Pro across both modes, but especially the performance mode. Compared to the base PS5’s upscaling method (TSR), there’s often a visible downgrade in image quality: more visual noise, flicker, and temporal instability in movement. Most notably, walking around Silent Hill’s streets, PSSR breaks the stability of the game’s Lumen reflections and GI. On the 60fps performance mode, world reflections in puddles now jitter from left to right, with no anti-aliasing to disguise their pixellation. Still shots don’t do it justice; they break up during movement itself. The second problem is the presentation of Lumen GI on PS5 Pro. Across the game’s early woodland route, the use of Lumen to simulate indirect lighting and shadow is affected: there are shimmering artefacts on shadowed elements, whereas on base PS5 they appear entirely stable.
Sadly then, the performance benefit of playing on PS5 Pro comes bundled with this downside. The one positive is that there is a slightly sharper picture on PS5 Pro using PSSR but its side-effects are hard to ignore. In general, there’s more flicker and break-up on geometry, while fine details like dangling cables show more pixellation. It’s hard to see the net benefit, and Bloober has confirmed it is aware of the issue with a patch in the works. Keeping the focus on the 60fps performance mode, pixel tests do help reveal what’s going on under the hood. PS5 Pro runs at a native, fixed 900p with PSSR engaged while targeting 60fps, reconstructing the result to 4K. It’s a change in rendering setup compared to the base PS5’s dynamic resolution in the same mode, which ranges from 864p to 1152p in typical play. Overall, it means we have a more conservative resolution target – and one that avoids the flexibility of DRS.