Alright, let me share how I actually tried out FSR 4 and saw it working on my PS5 Pro stuff. Remember, this is just my own messing around, nothing official.
First up, I heard the chatter about FSR 4. Sounds good on paper, right? Better than FSR 2? I figured, why not see what it really does for my PS5 Pro games right now. So, I grabbed the latest SDK docs – yeah, reading time, what a pain.
Getting it going wasn’t super smooth. Setting it up in the dev environment felt like pulling teeth at first. Old configs kept complaining. Had to dig through forums for like an hour, found one obscure post suggesting a specific compiler flag. Boom, that finally got it building. Relief!
Then came the actual testing part. I hooked up my dev kit, fired up one of our in-progress PS5 Pro builds. We’re using Unreal Engine, by the way. The goal was simple: swap out FSR 2 for FSR 4 and just… play. See the difference.
First impressions? Honestly, subtle, but there. I loaded into a really detailed environment, lots of intricate geometry. Looked closely at some chain-link fences off in the distance. With FSR 2, they tended to get a bit shimmery or look slightly broken as you moved. With FSR 4? Much cleaner. Held its shape way better while moving the camera around like a maniac. Less of that “crawling” effect.
Next test: Performance mode stuff. We cranked the internal res way down to stress-test the upscaling. FSR 2 sometimes made things look a bit soft or ‘vaseline smudgy’ when doing this aggressively. FSR 4, using the new Ultra Quality mode, actually pulled off sharper edges. Text on signs in the distance? Actually readable now. That was pretty cool to see.
The hair/fur thing everyone talks about? Tried it on a character with long hair. FSR 2 would often leave behind ghosting trails – faint outlines where the hair was moments ago, like a smudgy mess. FSR 4… way less of that. It was still there if you really looked for it under crazy fast motion, but a massive improvement. Like, put-your-magnifying-glass-down kind of improvement.
I spent a couple of hours just comparing different scenes:
- Looking at fine textures on brick walls
- Panning across dense foliage
- Tracking super fast-moving objects
The little wins added up. Less shimmer on thin wires, sharper textures on rocks when zoomed out, cleaner edges overall. FSR 4 feels like it works smarter with the information it’s got.
Is it magic? Nah. You can still spot some artifacts if you push it super hard or in specific, nasty scenes. But compared to how things looked before? It’s a solid step up for PS5 Pro devs like us. Implementing it meant tweaking settings a bit more than just dropping it in, but the payoff in visual clarity is worth the extra lunchtime debugging.
So yeah, playing with it live? FSR 4 actually delivers cleaner images, holds things together better when the action gets wild, and makes aggressive scaling modes look way less bad. That’s the real win from my afternoon deep dive.
