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This gallery consists of shots taken from today’s PC reveal trailer. They all seem to better resemble live gameplay than the sweetened images on the PlayStation blog.
Sony Interactive Entertainment -
The trailer doesn’t mention anything about using Nvidia DLSS to upscale the images being shown today… boy.
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God of War on PC.
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This shot in particular might be a good candidate for comparisons to the console original to see how the new version handles ambient occlusion and bounce lighting.
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God of War on PC.
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God of War on PC.
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God of War on PC.
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God of War on PC.
Sony’s bullish-if-slow attitude toward launching its biggest PlayStation exclusives on Windows PCs will continue in January 2022 with a release that pretty much everybody saw coming. The critically acclaimed 2018 reboot of God of War will be coming to PC.
What fans probably didn’t expect, however, was for Sony to ally with Nvidia for the release.
The PC version of God of War, arriving on January 14, 2022, will retail for $49.99, and its Steam listing already includes some technical details as of Wednesday morning. The most interesting addition is entirely new for Sony Interactive Entertainment launches on PC: support for Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) standard.
More “super” for Sony than FSR, apparently
DLSS requires Nvidia graphics cards from the RTX 2000 and RTX 3000 series because the feature needs those GPUs’ dedicated processing cores, which use machine-learning algorithms to analyze and upscale lower-resolution gaming images on the fly. Run a game at a native resolution of 1440p or 1080p with DLSS enabled, and that system will up-rez the real-time action to full 4K—not only with missing detail automatically inserted but often with fine details and anti-aliasing that beats the common temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) standard.
Sony has long had a hardware alliance with AMD, Nvidia’s biggest rival in the dedicated consumer graphics space. Sony has relied exclusively on AMD CPUs and GPUs for both its PS4 and PS5 console families (as has Microsoft for its Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles). Up until now, Sony’s loudest “upscaling” pronouncements came during the PlayStation 4 Pro era, in which Chief PlayStation Architect Mark Cerny talked extensively about how “checkerboarding” could fill in missing pixel gaps to supercharge PS4 games from 1080p to a faked 4K signal.
But this checkerboarding process merely spreads out existing pixels in ways that look splotchy upon close examination. While AMD’s own burgeoning FSR system provides smarter upscaling than that, DLSS is even sharper and more accurate in terms of processing lower native signals to higher pixel resolutions. (We’ve yet to see FSR formally land on any console games on either PS5 or Xbox Series X/S, but both console families support the standard.)
