Monster Hunter Wilds is a good looking game, but its console iterations aren’t perfect. The base PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X pack a lot of visual modes, but suffer from substantial image quality and performance woes while lacking the PC version’s higher-end settings. Sony’s PS5 Pro, though, should carry an antidote for these afflictions – with PSSR and ray tracing in the mix. Does Sony’s enhanced machine comprehensively address Wilds’ console failings then, or is there a deeper root cause?
The game’s 60fps frame-rate mode is the most exciting option on PS5 Pro for me, because the turnout on the base PS5 wasn’t great. The game suffered from excessive aliasing and image breakup, a consequence of relying on a pretty weak anti-aliasing solution with a crude mix of spatial upscaling and sharpening to make it look more refined on a 4K set. Internally, we were looking at resolutions from about 720p to 1080p with dynamic resolution scaling, but the system lacked the customary temporal upsampling process that can make a low-resolution render look decent on high-resolution displays.
PS5 Pro brings that upsampling to bear here, with an implementation of Sony’s PSSR upscaler – and the results are much improved, even in stills. The Pro is much more temporally stable relative to the base console, without the ugly stair-stepping artefacts that we saw on PS5. In scenes with a lot of dense geometry, the Pro resolves a much cleaner image that holds up well. Oddly, the base PS5 actually has an edge in terms of overall image sharpness, thanks to its post-process sharpening, but the fundamentals of the image are much stronger on Pro.
When we actually move through the game world, though, the differences are more stark. Here, the PS5 really struggles to resolve anything approaching a clean image, with constant and shifting stair-stepping geometry and flickering foliage. The Pro is far more pristine in comparison, resolving a smooth (if soft) image.