Assassin’s Creed Valhalla does not run at native 4K on PlayStation 5, Ubisoft says, DualShockers reports

This controversy is a few days old, but now there is another source saying that Ubisoft did in fact confirm, more than once, that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla does not run at native 4K on the PS5 but at “enhanced” 4K, meaning it runs at a lower resolution and is then upscaled (the image is artificially enlarged) to 4K.

There are quite clear differences between native and non-native 4K… the lower the resolution being upscaled to 4K, the more the image loses quality compared with native 4K, and the closer to the native (original) resolution, the closer the quality gets to 4K. For example, a game running at 1440p (2560 x 1440) when upscaled to 4K can’t reach the image quality of real 4K (3840 × 2160), while a game running at 1800p (3200×1800), although it still can’t match 4K (3840 × 2160) in image quality, gets much closer. Get it?

There are currently some techniques that can upscale to 4K with practically no loss… but they need dedicated hardware for it, and the game has to go through a machine learning process (an A.I. analyzes the game for a while, on computers dedicated to this, to learn details that allow the technique to be implemented). So far only Nvidia, with its DLSS 2.0, has hardware and software capable of good results with this. AMD, which makes the hardware for both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series S|X, announced at its latest conference that a similar solution is in development, but hasn’t said when it will be released or whether the new consoles will support it when it is.

Since we still don’t know the native (original) resolution at which the PlayStation 5 will run the game, we can’t yet know the size of the quality loss compared with the game running on its rival, the Xbox Series X, at native 4K. Let’s wait.