TOKYO: Sony has brought AI-powered image upscaling to the standard PlayStation 5, unveiling Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), a new technology tier that promises sharper and more stable visuals for the console's tens of millions of owners — without requiring them to buy a PS5 Pro.
The announcement came on Thursday via the official PlayStation Blog, in a post by Daniel Craig, Principal Engineer of Graphics R&D at Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Built for the base console
QSSR was born from Project Amethyst, Sony's AI graphics collaboration with AMD, and is described as a new performance tier of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling library that debuted on the PS5 Pro. It rests on two key innovations: a streamlined neural network architecture and a hand-tuned implementation designed to maximise performance on the standard PS5.
Since PSSR launched on the PS5 Pro, players and developers have asked whether similar image-quality improvements could come to the base console. Until now, PSSR's computational demands made that impossible. Sony says PSSR remains the "gold standard" on the PS5 Pro, while QSSR provides "notable improvements to both image detail and image stability" on the standard PS5.
First games patched
The first titles to use the new library are Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei. Both were patched on Thursday to offer QSSR as an additional graphics option on the PS5.
"Our team at Insomniac works hard to make sure each of our games is a showcase of PlayStation hardware, and we're excited for Marvel's Wolverine to be one of the first titles to bring this new QSSR technology to players," said Mike Fitzgerald, Head of Technology at Insomniac Games. He added that QSSR "adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments" and "brings a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5".
Jasmin Patry, Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, said QSSR "excels at resolving the fine details in our characters and environments and does so with a level of temporal stability that hasn't been possible on the PS5 console until now".
Sony said QSSR will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers, and that it expects the improvements to appear in many more titles going forward.
Sources: AI upscaling is coming to PS5 (PlayStation.Blog); Sony Unveils QSSR, a New AI Upscaling Tier for the Standard PS5 (Unite.AI)
The announcement came on Thursday via the official PlayStation Blog, in a post by Daniel Craig, Principal Engineer of Graphics R&D at Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Built for the base console
QSSR was born from Project Amethyst, Sony's AI graphics collaboration with AMD, and is described as a new performance tier of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling library that debuted on the PS5 Pro. It rests on two key innovations: a streamlined neural network architecture and a hand-tuned implementation designed to maximise performance on the standard PS5.
Since PSSR launched on the PS5 Pro, players and developers have asked whether similar image-quality improvements could come to the base console. Until now, PSSR's computational demands made that impossible. Sony says PSSR remains the "gold standard" on the PS5 Pro, while QSSR provides "notable improvements to both image detail and image stability" on the standard PS5.
First games patched
The first titles to use the new library are Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei. Both were patched on Thursday to offer QSSR as an additional graphics option on the PS5.
"Our team at Insomniac works hard to make sure each of our games is a showcase of PlayStation hardware, and we're excited for Marvel's Wolverine to be one of the first titles to bring this new QSSR technology to players," said Mike Fitzgerald, Head of Technology at Insomniac Games. He added that QSSR "adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments" and "brings a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5".
Jasmin Patry, Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, said QSSR "excels at resolving the fine details in our characters and environments and does so with a level of temporal stability that hasn't been possible on the PS5 console until now".
Sony said QSSR will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers, and that it expects the improvements to appear in many more titles going forward.
Sources: AI upscaling is coming to PS5 (PlayStation.Blog); Sony Unveils QSSR, a New AI Upscaling Tier for the Standard PS5 (Unite.AI)
