Sony’s in-house PSSR isn’t holding up all that well for PS5 games. Since the PS5 Pro launched last month, multiple games have suffered from so-called “downgraded” visuals as a result of PS5 Pro Enhanced patches. Silent Hill 2, Alan Wake 2 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard to name a few. It seems that PSSR is causing some nasty shimmering artefacts on games.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the latest game to come out with the issue. The 2023 action game from Ubisoft was patched with PS5 Pro enhancements a few days back and users claim the results aren’t good at all. Many of them say the upgrade looks worse than the base PS5 visuals.



Digital Foundry says Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora now runs at 1280-1440p with PSSR upscaling the game to 4K. However, the upscaling is the problem. The issues don’t stem from only shimmering. Users say when panning the camera around the game, shadows appear and disappear at random times. Assets then load in and out with broken draw distance issues being an eyesore. Of course, the PSSR causes shimmering across all the foliage. Given how much vegetation there is in Avatar, this doesn’t look great.

The big issue with all these games is that there’s no way to tell the game to use the old graphics mode once you have updated it. So if you have a PS5 Pro and the patch essentially downgrades the visuals, you have to live with it until hopefully, the developer fixes it. At the moment it also seems like Sony itself needs to jump in to improve PSSR because the tech simply isn’t panning out.

A detailed thread on Resetera shows just how many of these PS5 Pro-enhanced games have been downgraded since being patched. The issues also seem to be only related to third-party games at the moment. So we don’t know if Sony is doing a better job at enhancing games or perhaps third-party devs don’t have the knowledge to implement these upgrades properly.

You can watch the full breakdown of this downgrade in the video below.