Horizon Forbidden West has received a PS5 Pro patch and the game represents one of the best-looking and most interesting efforts we’ve seen on the new console. After all, developers Guerrilla Games are famous for their use of checkerboard rendering on PS4 and PS5, and they’ve now moved onto something new – but it’s not PSSR, the upscaler introduced on PS5 Pro that has been used in so many other PS5 Pro enhanced games. Instead, it’s its own solution – a kind of ‘Guerilla Super Resolution’, if you will, and it represents some of the cleanest reconstructed image quality we’ve seen on consoles. Just how good is it? We decided to find out.
To refresh your memory, Horizon Forbidden West on PS5 includes performance and resolution modes, which have been combined into a performance pro mode for the new console. Since a patch in summer 2022, performance mode on base PS5 has run at a circa 1800p checkerboard with dynamic resolution scaling, trading a bit of image quality and stability for a 60fps update rate that makes the game much smoother to play.
The new performance pro mode keeps that same 60fps but increases clarity substantially with an internal resolution of around 1440p. This mode boasts improved subpixel detail, better texture clarity and better anti-aliasing which is particularly noticeable on transparencies like foliage. Temporal stability is also improved, meaning the image suffers from fewer instances of artefacts or breakup. Finally, screen space reflections and depth-of-field effects are also noticeably improved, without the characteristic checkerboard pattern in SSR or shimmer in depth-of-field.
All things combined, you can examine the image from only a few inches away without spotting any imperfections, save for some minor ghosting with foliage – it’s impressive stuff.
Of course, the PS5 already had a mode that boasted better image quality and stability – the resolution mode. This is limited to 30fps, of course, but how does it fare against the new performance pro mode? In short, the difference is minimised – but still exists. The old resolution mode, which was often a native 4K, is slightly sharper and has better screen-space reflections, but the performance pro mode still has its benefits in terms of image stability and anti-aliasing.
There is also a resolution pro mode on the PS5 Pro, which offers the same native 4K and 30fps update rate as the old resolution mode, but with the new anti-aliasing method. This looks a touch sharper and has those better screen-space reflections, but the sacrifice of halving your frame-rate is ultimately too costly to really recommend – and as even Guerrilla’s own tech director said to us at the PS5 Pro preview event, “friends don’t let friends play at 30Hz”.
Happily, both performance pro and resolution pro run at an almost-perfect lock for their chosen frame-rates; we only managed to get the game to drop a single frame in an intense fight at 60fps, while the 30fps mode was 100 percent perfect outside of the usual frame drops on camera cuts we see in many games. You can also unlock the frame-rate in the performance pro mode by turning on 120Hz VRR support in the PS5 menus, which sees the game run into the 70s at points but also drop below 60fps on occasion. With VRR to smooth things out, you’re taking fuller advantage of the power on offer with slighter higher internal resolutions or frame-rates, but it’s not a huge change either way.
The game also comes with a balanced pro mode if 120Hz is enabled, offering a 40fps update rate and settings between the resolution pro and performance pro modes. This mode feels a bit superfluous on the PS5 Pro, but provides another trade-off between fidelity and performance if you’re interested. For most people though, the 60fps performance pro mode is the obvious recommendation.
Given that Horizon Forbidden West has an excellent PC port with support for other upscalers, it seemed natural to compare Guerrilla’s new method on PS5 Pro with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR 3, using a similar 1440p to 4K upscale. This isn’t the most challenging scenario for an upscaler – typically we see greater differences between different techniques when input resolutions are much lower – but it’s still an interesting point of comparison for what Guerrilla has achieved.
Based on side-by-side comparisons, it has managed to deliver something extremely similar to DLSS on PC, though the chances are that machine learning is not involved (such a solution already exists – PSSR – and we have doubts that Guerrilla would have trained its own neural network). Nvidia’s solution handles particle trails better, but Guerrilla’s better handles reflections in water, with smoother and less aliased results. The Guerrilla upscaler also fares marginally better in terms of motion, though the tiny amount of motion blur forced on in the PS5 version does confound the comparison somewhat. The FSR versus ‘GSR’ comparison is more heavily in favour of what Guerrilla has managed on PS5, with FSR tending to over-accumulate, leading to blurry grass when the camera is stationary and softer results in general – but still a perfectly acceptable resolve overall.
It’s an impressive result for the home-grown solution and its efficacy perhaps speaks to why Guerrilla opted against using Sony’s PSSR for its PS5 Pro update. The studio said that it developed the technique for its own future titles, then backported it to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and Horizon Forbidden West, so it’ll be fascinating to see whether it’ll be deployed elsewhere – or even by other Sony internal studios – in the future.