PlayStation 5 Pro: what does the PS4 image enhancement feature actually do?
To what extent do legacy PS4 games improve on a 4K screen?PlayStation 5 Pro arrives complete with a somewhat enigmatic feature - the ability to enhance the image quality of older PS4 software. A toggleable menu option suggests that the new console has the ability to 'improve the resolution of select PS4 games' but there's no explanation of what it actually does.
In general, you should expect to see improvements in PS4 games without a PS4 Pro version, and lower-res PS4 Pro enhanced games, and the improvements should be most obvious in games that present clear, sharp edges without effects like film grain or chromatic aberration.
interesting point of comparison is LS1, which is the machine learning-based spatial upscaler available in the Lossless Scaling PC app. In a title like Granblue Fantasy: Relink, which uses TAA, it achieves a sharper, perceptibly more detailed image without the artifacts we'd usually see with sharpening. Comparing LS1 and Sony's enhanced upscaling technique, I'd say Sony's technique slightly edges out LS1 in clarity here, but it's close. Texture detail also looks clearer and sharper without edge ringing - just look at the floorboards here as one example. That inner surface detail appears more pleasing, not just geometric detail. This is an area where LS1 appears substantially better than the Pro.
The Pro's enhancement process is comparable to LS1 on text and 2D elements. Both do a substantially better job than 1080p with a naive upscale to 4K, though both exhibit noticeable artifacts and can struggle with different kinds of problems. For instance, Sony's solution has greater difficulty differentiating this line from the background than LS1.
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