Sony introduced QSSR earlier this month, bringing a version of the PS5 Pro’s acclaimed PSSR upscaler to base PS5 hardware.
While the technology is currently only incorporated into first-party titles Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, it will be made available to third-party devs as well, with many speculating its introduction may have been timed specifically to coincide with GTA 6.
(Which, according to Rockstar’s marketing, will “play best on PS5”.)
However, tech experts Digital Foundry don’t believe there’s any evidence of its implementation in this week’s launch trailer, which was captured on Sony’s console according to a disclaimer in the video.
Speaking as part of a 20-minute video, Rich Leadbetter said:
“I don’t think we’re seeing it here. If the internal rendering resolution is 1440p, then what is QSSR doing? If it’s going to be upscaling to 4K, based on the numbers we have looking at Quality Mode in Marvel’s Wolverine, you’re looking at 4ms to do an upscale to 4K. And if you’ve got a 33ms render budget, that’s well over 10% of your rendering budget just on QSSR. That’s quite extravagant.
So the question is: if it’s in there, how are they going to use it? And what would it look like if your internal resolution is already relatively high and ‘good enough’. But image quality was one of the things we criticised in the Extended Look, and I’m curious to know what QSSR could bring to the table and the viability of it.”
This is obviously quite complicated analysis from Leadbetter, but he’s essentially saying that QSSR may not be the right fit for GTA 6 if the game is already targeting a resolution that scales adequately to 4K screens. (In this instance, native 1440p.)
In particular, he notes that the processing cost he observed in Marvel’s Wolverine would eat quite significantly into GTA 6’s rendering budget, and it’s not clear how this would necessarily benefit the game.
Of course, this launch trailer was likely captured using older footage, and it’s entirely possible things may change for the final product, due out on 19th November.
But as of right now, there’s no evidence of QSSR. I’m sure a lot more will be said and written about GTA 6’s visuals on PS5 hardware once the final product is out in the wild.
