– PSSR 2 in 007 First Light is reportedly easy to implement, with no per-scene tuning needed and immediate, consistent results across the game.
– The upgrade significantly improves image quality by resolving more details and reducing noise, per Digital Foundry.
– PSSR 2 shares similarities with FSR 4, and AMD confirms FSR 4 will reach older RDNA 3 GPUs, suggesting comparable image gains on those cards.
IO Interactive’s 007 First Light is a AAA James Bond spy action-adventure that many have been waiting for
the game is scheduled to release on May 27 for the Xbox Series X | S, the Sony PlayStation 5 consoles, and Steam. 007 First Light will also be available on the PS5 Pro, where the game will utilize Sony’s upgraded PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR).
Image quality boosts and quick implementation
while 007 First Light using the upgraded PSSR is a big deal for image quality, more on that later, it is the manner of the implementation that has piqued our interest. IO Interactive reports on the PlayStation Blog that implementing PSSR 2 in 007 First Light was a breeze.
Developer notes on the ease of PSSR 2
Jon Rocatis, Principal Render Engineer at IO Interactive, claims that it only took the developers about a day to implement the new PSSR, and developers “were essentially happy with what we saw straight away. No per-scene tuning, no special-case work — it just held up across the whole game”. Jon’s statement was backed by another IO Interactive developer on X who also claimed that PSSR 2 was super easy to implement and the results looked good right out of the box.
Expectation of widespread adoption
so, it seems like it doesn’t need a lot of work to get the upgraded PSSR working in a game. we can expect a lot of games to have the technology baked in, which will be very good news, as Digital Foundry has confirmed that PSSR 2 is a huge upgrade over the original.
Digital Foundry and comparisons
Digital Foundry’s analysis of the new PSSR (linked below) essentially backs what IO Interactive exclaims in their write-up on the PlayStation Blog. the upgraded PSSR resolves more details, improves noise, and outputs a much better image than the original.
Relation to FSR 4 and hardware considerations
interestingly, it looks like the upgraded PSSR shares a lot in common with FSR 4. some even consider it just an INT8 version of FSR 4. AMD has now confirmed that FSR 4 is coming to older RDNA 3 GPUs, which don’t have access to RDNA 4’s FP8 acceleration. so, when FSR 4 comes to RDNA 3 cards like the RX 7800 XT, we can expect image quality similar to that of the upgraded PSSR.
