Red Dead Redemption on PlayStation has one impressive upgrade
Red Dead Redemption is one of the highest-profile games that has been stuck on seventh-gen console hardware. Rockstar’s western epic released all the way back in 2010 on Xbox 360 and PS3, with no proper modern port or PC version to speak of. The best we’ve had has been backwards compatibility support for Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles – which did at least give us a 2160p presentation on Xbox One X and Series X, dropping back to 1440p for Series S.
Over 13 years later, we finally have an updated release – and there are both positive and negative aspects to the port. We’ll be looking at the PS4 version today, tested on the base machine, PS4 Pro and under back compat on PS5. (Our work continues on the Nintendo Switch version but – spoilers! – it does run at native 1080p when docked.)
First up, there is a key improvement to the PS4 version that has a profound benefit for all tested consoles. Image quality comparisons for each PlayStation system stacked up against their Xbox equivalent reveal a much more stable image. Fine geometric elements and foliage seem sharp and solid, while even Series X running at 2160p with 2x MSAA has an unstable resolve with obvious jagged edges.
I initially suspected we were just looking at simple TAA on PS5, but the options menu indicates that FSR2 is actually in use here – AMD’s popular temporal upsampling and anti-aliasing solution. The weird thing is that every shot on both PS4 Pro and PS5 seems to resolve to a full 4K resolution, meaning the FSR2 is providing anti-aliasing coverage without a performance benefit, as the game is already running at native resolution. There’s a possibility dynamic res is in place, but I didn’t spot any evidence of it in my testing. It’s unusual for sure, but that seems to be the situation. So, in effect, developer Double Eleven is using FSR2 as a temporal super-sampler – and the benefits are obvious. Xbox consoles retain the 2x MSAA of Xbox 360 and while it’s still impressive on One X and Series X in particular, PlayStation just looks smoother and cleaner.
