Ubisoft has shared an update to the PlayStation 5 Pro situation for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora released about a year ago to reviews that were not quite glowing or harsh, but just about OK. Subsequently, the game itself did not meet sales expectations, ensuring that the Avatar fandom will never beat the allegations.
Ubisoft revealed that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora would be one of many games jumping to get that PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced badge, and it’s easy to see Ubisoft hoping that this title would find a second life on Sony’s mid-generation upgrade.
However, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora turned out to be one of several games that ironically ended up worse on the PlayStation 5 Pro. As this Digital Foundry video explained, the patch that should have made this game run better actually made it worse on the PlayStation 5 Pro compared to the original SKU.
Digital Foundry particularly pointed to PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) as the issue on a technical level, as it is not doing the job of upscaling the game’s graphics to 4K properly.
Today, Ubisoft shared this message on Twitter:
“Our team is working on addressing the issues introduced with the PlayStation 5 Pro update for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
On December 12th, we will deploy a hotfix allowing PS5 Pro players to choose between enabling or disabling PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. With PSSR disabled, the game will use the same upscaling technology as the PlayStation 5.
While the PS5 Pro Quality (60 FPS) mode will still be available, PS5 Pro players will be able to toggle between the base Performance (60 FPS) and Quality (30 FPS) modes.
We will continue improving the quality of the PS5 Pro Quality Mode (60 FPS) using PSSR. We will let you know as soon as we can share more.
Thank you,
The Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora development team.”
As we reported last week, the PlayStation 5 Pro’s performance has become a big talking point since the console launched. While fans debated if the improvements the console could bring would be worth the asking price, none of us expected that the new console could run games worse.
We don’t want to blow this out of proportion, so to be clear, a small number of third party games are facing these issues, and games published by Sony are performing spectacularly on the PlayStation 5 Pro with PSSR.
As we argued, these issues stem from PSSR still going through its growing pains. In hindsight, it was naïve to assume that Sony’s upscaler wouldn’t have to go through this when Nvidia and AMD needed years to work out the issues with DLSS and FSR. Intel very recently started work on their XeSS upscaler and we saw them go through the same growing pains as well.
So, we do expect that these issues will be addressed in time. But here and now, this is definitely a situation where consumers should consider if the PlayStation 5 Pro is worth its steep launch price to get into here and now. It may be worth it after Sony addresses these issues, or after they give the PlayStation 5 Pro a price cut, or if Sony does both.
But we certainly don’t think this issue will be exclusive to the games that have the problem now. So it’s absolutely something gamers need to consider, lest a large number of gamers unthinkingly collectively earn that buyer’s remorse because they didn’t do their research before throwing their money down.
