Sony is bringing AI graphics upscaling to the regular PS5, and the company is doing it with a new piece of tech called Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR for short. The announcement comes from a blog post that describes QSSR as a “new performance tier of AI upscaling,” a result of Sony’s Project Amethyst work with AMD.
Here is what is actually changing, and what it means for the games you might play today.
What QSSR Does
QSSR is designed to take lower-resolution images and make them look sharper. The idea is simple: a game renders at a lower resolution than your TV can display, and the PS5 processes that image in real time to fill in the gaps. Sony says the tech is a drop-in replacement for titles that already support PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, which is the version of this upscaling that ships on the PS5 Pro.
The catch is that the PS5 does not have the same hardware as the PS5 Pro.
Why the PS5 Is Different
The PS5 Pro has dedicated machine learning silicon, which makes PSSR faster. The regular PS5 does not have that hardware. Sony principal graphics R&D engineer Daniel Craig told Digital Foundry that developers on the PS5 have to be more flexible than on the Pro.
“On PS5 Pro, developers almost uniformly output to 4K and adjust render resolution beneath it,” Craig said. “On PS5, teams have to be more flexible, tuning not just render resolution, but also their intermediate and final presentation targets depending on the graphics mode.”
Digital Foundry’s early hands-on with the tech suggests QSSR is not as fast as PSSR because the PS5 does not have dedicated machine learning silicon. As a result, you should probably expect closer to an upscaled 1440p resolution on PS5 instead of the upscaled 4K on PS5 Pro.
Which Games Get It First
Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei will be the first games to take advantage of QSSR. Both games are getting patches today to offer the tech as “an additional graphics option on PS5.” Ghost of Yōtei Complete Edition also launches today.
Sony says the tech will be “offered broadly to all PlayStation developers.” That means more games could follow.
The Hands-On Look
Digital Foundry shared a couple of videos from Sony showing how QSSR looks in those two games. The clips appear to show graphics that are a little sharper.
The potential here is remarkable: low resolution and poor upscaling have impacted so many titles in this generation, but QSSR could make a big difference.
What Developers Need to Know
Craig said that QSSR is “fundamentally a drop-in replacement for titles that already support PSSR” after only a few days of tuning. That is the key technical detail. A developer who has already built PSSR support into a game should not need extensive code changes to add QSSR to the PS5 version.
That makes it more likely that PS5 developers will take advantage of the tech. The patch process is simple: add the option, ship it.
The Limits of the Tech
The PS5’s weaker hardware means QSSR will not match PSSR’s speed. That is the trade-off Sony is asking developers to accept. PSSR runs on the PS5 Pro’s dedicated machine learning silicon; QSSR runs on the PS5’s general processing power instead.
What the Comparison Means
The comparison between PSSR and QSSR is the story’s core. Sony is offering the same feature on two different consoles, but the results will not be identical. The PS5 Pro gets a faster, higher-quality upscale because it has dedicated hardware. The PS5 gets a slower upscale because it does not.
What Comes Next
The PS5 now has a path to sharper graphics that the base console did not have before. The question is whether developers will bother. The answer may depend on how the patches perform in actual play.
For now, the future belongs to Wolverine and Yōtei.
Source material: “Sony brings AI graphics upscaling to the regular PS5,” The Verge.
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