Topic: DF got it wrong: base res on PS5 Pro for Pragmata

Not sure why the team hasn't addressed this or updated their reporting, but channel Brazil Pixel is demonstrating that DF's pixel count for Pragmata is wrong, at least for the 60FPS mode. I do wonder why DF is not relying on tools like the one this channel uses, I know they have discussed this before on the DF direct and that it takes some work to actually apply this from game to game, but this Brazil Pixel appears to achieve very accurate results on their videos, and I personally enjoy having a graph to show the actual behavior of DRS.

For reference, DF reported the game runs in 864p at all times on the Pro, but findings show that the game is running at 1080p on the Pro when HFR is toggled off.

Manual pixel counts are far more reliable than the image scanners, which struggle to account for upscaling properly, even basic AA can mess with them sometimes. That is why counts on raw edges after camera cuts are far better when anything temporal is in play.

At around 2:35 on the video, there's a comparison of raw pixels on an edge just after a camera cut, so this channel did check for that as well. And if I recall from the time this channel was discussed by DF, they have a bespoke solution to actually calculate the pixels on screen prior to upscaling.

I was confused about this too but then I remembered seeing a screenshot of the RT reflections in PRAGMATA on both the PS5 and PS5 Pro. The PS5 version has sharper RT reflections than the PS5 Pro due to the PS5 version running at 1080p.

RT reflections scale with resolution so that kind of implied to me that the PS5 Pro version is, indeed, sub-1080p. If both games where rendered at 1080p before upscaling then the RT reflections on PS5 and PS5 Pro should look identical.

That is my understanding anyway.

What confused me more is that using the PS5 Pro save on the PS5 makes the game render at 1440p instead of 1080p. Seems to imply that maybe the PS5 Pro upscales to 1440p using PSSR2, which is what the save file picks up on, and then the TV itself upscales it to 4K.

Still the idea that a game is upscaling from 864p to 2160p on the PS5 Pro kind of makes me cringe a bit even though I know that it is the quality of the final image that matters and PRAGMATA definitely looks sharp and clean on the PS5 Pro. I think it has more to do with hearing that the base PS5 renders at 1080p so hearing that the PS5 Pro renders fewer pixels kind of irks me because I paid all that extra money for more powerful hardware. I'm sure at some point this will just become an accepted thing but I am from a generation that grew up with the Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s with each new generation of hardware outputting higher and higher resolutions.

@Darren1967 but it could also be that the difference in sharpness of the RT reflections stem from the PSSR upscale rather than the base resolution. In any case, you can't actually conclude the resolution the game's operating in based on the appearance of RT reflections unless it's a like for like scenario, but between PS5 and PS5 Pro the upscalers are entirely different so the treatment these reflections are going through to get to the resulting image is entirely different as well.

@Hustler_One - I get what you are saying but my take is that PSSR2's superior upscaling should result in RT reflections that should look better on PS5 Pro than PS5, and at worse, they should be the same, even if they both used the same 1080p base resolution to upscale from.

Since they don't then I think this does explain why the RT reflections look worse on PS5 Pro than PS5, which really should not be happening, and supports the 864p resolution on PS5 Pro. The PS5 Pro is supposed to offer the premium PS5 experience, right. Everything - graphics, resolutiuon, framerate - should be the same or ideally better but definitely not worse on PS5 Pro.

It's a shame that the reflections are worse when the overall image quality is so much better. They stand out quite a bit so I hope there's something that can be done.