DF Direct Weekly #284: Ghost of Yōtei QSSR Tested, Star Wars Galactic Racer, Gears E-Day PC

Richard Leadbetter (0:02)

Hello there, and a warm welcome to the 284th edition of DF Direct Weekly, our weekly show discussing the latest gaming and technology news of highly eventful week. Lots to talk about. Joining me first of all, he's back from vacation, he's back from Japan, John Linneman.

John Linneman (0:18)

Rich, hello. Squadron Commander Rich, I'm here. I'm back addicted to Ace Combat 8 Nice. I'm working on a video right now.

Well, I had to finish another very, very big project that I worked on for like a month. That's almost done, but Ace Combat 8, I just have to shout from the rooftops. It is so good. It reminds me why I love video games in the first place. Nice.

Richard Leadbetter (0:41)

Yeah, we could all use that at the moment.

John Linneman (0:44)

Absolutely. My goodness.

Richard Leadbetter (0:47)

Also joining us, hello, Will Judd.

Will Judd (0:49)

Hello, or as I should say, yes, Rich. It's good to be here subbing in for Oliver, I guess.

Two shows in one week. It's got to be a new record for me.

Richard Leadbetter (1:02)

Excellent. Oliver is around. It's just that he's got a scheduled power outage at the moment.

John Linneman (1:06)

I know, but you do.

Richard Leadbetter (1:08)

He couldn't make it for the taping session.

John Linneman (1:11)

Amazing stuff. That is fun.

Richard Leadbetter (1:14)

Okay.

This one has been quite remarkable. A couple of weeks ago, I was approached by Sony to basically take a look at something new. We've been cooking up for the base PlayStation 5, the standard model. It turned out to be QSSR, which is essentially a refactoring of PSSR for the PlayStation 5 professional, kind of like strategically paired back and refactored for the base PlayStation 5, which is quite remarkable, bearing in mind that it doesn't actually support machine learning based acceleration. The video is out there. It's attracted a lot of views, so thanks for that. And we're going to be taking a look primarily at Ghost of Yōtei, which we didn't cover in so much depth in the video, although we had about an hour on it in the end. Just spent so much time on Wolverine where the effects were quite transformative. But I'm going to come to you first on this one, John, because until yesterday, you hadn't seen it. Obviously, you've been on vacation. The patches, quote unquote, dropped yesterday. And I guess, first of all, let's get a recap on Wolverine, or rather your thoughts on Wolverine, because it's fair to say that we've got two very different sort of presentations of QSSR here. Wolverine, it's kind of like, I think you said it best in the Slack channel. It's kind of like, I can see the difference here from across the room. Whereas Ghost of Yōtei, we had to work quite hard to actually find meaningful differences.

So yeah, it's an interesting brace of titles to lodge with here. But yeah, curious about your thoughts.

John Linneman (2:50)

Yeah, so starting with Wolverine, as you said, first of all, Insomniac does the thing that I love, where when you highlight in the menu, they allow you to see the background of the game behind the menu, which is amazing. Because then it allows you to directly see the difference in real time as you toggle back and forth. And sure enough, as you alluded to, it was a pretty phenomenal difference, I would say.

The original Insomniac Temporal Upsampler does a good job when the resolution is high enough, but you can tell that for this, and I guess maybe with Spider-Man 2 as well, the base resolution, the input resolution is a bit lower than you might like. And you get a lot of those classic problems. You get the kind of blurry edges. You get a lot of that like shimmering noise, especially on like thin objects where it's even when you're like sitting still, they actually kind of flicker and pulse, and it just looked noisy and grainy. There's a lot of that stuff in there. And PS, sorry, not PSSR, QSSR absolutely cleans that all the way up in a way that was actually quite surprising. It does present very similarly to PSSR in a way, in that you just, you instantly see more detail resolved in the scene, pixel edges become sharper and cleaner.

But the big thing is that it does clean up all of that temporal dithering noise and shimmer that was so prevalent without it. And since I didn't get to cover the game originally, I had only played it on PS5 Pro up to this point. And I was surprised at how much worse it looks on a base PS5 when not using QSSR. So it's like, I feel like this really, really changes the game, and I'll be curious to see what other games end up using this on PS5, because it kind of solves some major problems that has been, I would say Wolverine is maybe a little better than it, but we've seen a lot of like Fsr based games on the PS5. And with those lower input resolutions, especially on like Unreal stuff, it gets pretty dire, I must admit. It's kind of noisy, just soft and just flickery and all that kind of stuff. And this actually seems like if the performance cost is within budget, it could really help with that and almost give extra life to the base PS5 in a way. Like I don't think it actually matches PSSR, but it's much closer to that. Yeah. You know what I mean?