On April 7, we’re officially offering the new upgraded version of PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) to Assassin’s Creed Shadows PS5 Pro players, alongside Title Update 1.1.9. PSSR is an AI library that analyzes game images pixel by pixel as it upscales them, and it’s been used to boost the effective resolution of over 50 titles on PS5 Pro to date.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was supporting the original PSSR since its launch and now will be among the first titles to offer this new version, launching April 7 at 7:00am Pacific Time.
Here’s a deeper look at the optimization it brings to the image quality overall:
Improved image quality across all modes
With the upgraded PSSR, image quality is consistently improved throughout the game. Environments appear cleaner and more stable, with better reconstruction of fine details.
“The upgraded PSSR significantly enhances Assassin’s Creed Shadows by delivering sharper pixel quality and exceptional image stability, effectively eliminating distracting visual artifacts caused by motion and vibration, and creating a smoother, more immersive experience that allows players to stay fully engaged in the world without interruption.”
– Robert Foriel, Technical Art Director
These benefits apply across all PS5 Pro modes — Performance, Balanced, and Quality — which render at different internal resolutions with Dynamic Resolution Scaling. The new PSSR allows each mode to deliver higher visual fidelity, reducing the trade-offs between performance and image quality. Whether targeting higher frame rates or higher internal resolution, the final image remains sharper and more stable than before.
Better handling of complex rendering
Assassin’s Creed Shadows features dense vegetation, advanced ray-traced lighting, and a wide range of dynamic effects — all of which can be challenging for image reconstruction.
The new PSSR delivers particularly strong results in these scenarios:
Dynamic vegetation: Windy grass shows some of the most visible improvements. In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, foliage is driven by our Atmos system with fluid simulation–based wind, resulting in highly complex and natural motion across large environments. This kind of dense, thin geometry is especially challenging, with constant motion and frequent visibility changes across frames. The upgraded PSSR preserves fine details at close range, allowing individual blades of grass to remain clearly defined even in motion, while also improving crispness at longer distances, with cleaner edges on trees and other distant foliage.
Particles and transparency: Particle effects appear cleaner and more stable. These elements often involve layers of transparency and independent motion, which makes it challenging to determine which motion vectors to use — the particle’s, the background’s, or a combination of both. The new PSSR handles these scenarios seamlessly, keeping particle effects visually consistent during motion and maintaining the cinematic feel of the world.
Ray-traced lighting and stochastic effects: Real-time ray tracing generates inherently noisy signals because only a limited number of rays are traced per frame. This produces both low-frequency noise — subtle variations that are difficult to perceive — and high-frequency noise that can be amplified during upscaling. The new PSSR handles these stochastic signals more effectively, allowing ray-traced effects like reflections, ambient occlusion, and dynamic lighting to be reconstructed more accurately across complex scenes. It reduces the need for manual adjustments, while the resulting image remains stable and visually consistent even in areas with dense foliage or complex lighting interactions.
A smoother, more consistent experience
Overall, the new PSSR results in a sharper, cleaner, more detailed and immersive experience with less compromise than ever.
“Integrating the upgraded PSSR into Assassin’s Creed Shadows was straightforward — the code changes were minimal, almost identical to the original PSSR integration,” says Nicolas Lopez, Technical Architect. “Yet the upgrade brings a noticeable improvement in image quality across the board. It’s rare to get such a significant visual boost with so little tuning required.”
Get ready for April 7
We hope you enjoyed this technical deep dive into the making of the updated PS5 Pro version of Assassin’s Creed.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, now with one year of updates under its belt. The new PSSR enhancements will be available starting April 7.
Thank you to the contributors of the article: Sebastien Daigneault, Project Lead Programmer – Rendering, and Robert Foriel, Technical Art Director at Ubisoft.