Alan Wake 2 is one of our games of the generation - a proper technical showcase - but with the arrival of Sony's upgraded PSSR upscaler, it's also a key proving ground for the capabilities of the revised technology. In its 60fps performance mode, the game's complex foliage, dense geometry and demanding lighting are paired with an internal 864p resolution, upscaled to 4K. It's a challenge that the original PSSR couldn't handle, sometimes comparing unfavourably with the original FSR2. However, the upgraded PSSR is a revelation by comparison.

Let's quickly recap on the issues we saw in this game with this first-gen PSSR. The image suffered from a fine, unstable noise layer that resembled film grain, visible across foliage, street scenes and other mid-frequency detail. With a meagre resolution to reconstruct from, anti-aliasing struggled to be effective on elements like power lines, causing shimmering. Ambient occlusion could pulse, most evident in motion.

The upgraded PSSR improves the situation across the board. Alan Wake 2's forested areas no longer exhibit the pulsating indirect lighting, there's no pixel crawl on foliage, while the image in motion is significantly clearer and more coherent overall. Street scenes could visible "wiggle" now present as consistent, defined surfaces.

Overheard cables - a classic stress test for temporal upscalers due to sub-pixel issues at lower resolutions - aren't completely solved, but the improvement is substantial. A night and day difference, almost. There's a clarity boost to texture detail now, which is also welcome, while line completion is obviously better and flicker is reduced. The bottom line is that the new PSSR is able to deliver a convincingly 4K-like presentation, even with a challenging 2.5x upscale in both X and Y axes.

It's not a totally clean bill of health, however. There's a subtle image characteristic where certain high frequency regions such as distant trees or very fine texture detail can present a slight "pepper-like" look. This seems less like an obvious artefact and perhaps more of a "signature" to the algorithm - similar to the stylised lines found in the old CNN DLSS model, or the disocclusion fizzle of FSR2 and FSR3. It's not immediately noticeable though, nor does it distract - it's more of a tell than a flaw.

There are improvements with the 30fps quality mode, running roughly at 1270p with a less challenging 4K upscale, but it's more of a refinement than a game changer compared to the original PSSR - likely because base resolution is relatively high. So it's an incremental improvement here, with more subtle boosts to image stability, clarity and texture detail.

Ray tracing quality also remains much the same in the quality mode, with its compromises seemingly unrelated to upscaler quality. It's more likely an issue with the denoiser which delivers a stippled, noisy presentation - something the new PSSR cannot address. It's still just an upscaler, not a ray reconstruction or ray regeneration technique. It can only work with the noisy inputs it's given.

Alan Wake 2 in performance mode is an interesting test for the upgraded PSSR - and the key reason why we chose to focus on this game specifically. The base image being fed to the algorithm is a challenge - not least because of its 864p native resolution - but the good news is that the game looks a whole lot better than many of the FSR2-based performance modes seen on the base PlayStation 5. Similar to Silent Hill f, what was once a showcase for PSSR's limitations becomes an example of the massive improvements delivered by the newly upgraded version.

And if Alan Wake 2 can look this good upscaled from 864p, it bodes well for the future of PS5 Pro titles, where more of the hardware can be dedicated to quality of pixels as opposed to quantities of them. Higher frame-rates, more ambitious effects or more comprehensive RT features become possible without the end result looking poor on a living room TV and without unfavourable comparisons to the base PS5.