Sony is bringing AI-based image upscaling to the standard PlayStation 5, following its debut on the more expensive PS5 Pro.
The new system, Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), is described by Sony as a "new performance tier of AI upscaling" and is the first visible fruit of Project Amethyst, the graphics collaboration between Sony and AMD. According to Sony's PlayStation Blog, the technology will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers, and QSSR is designed as a drop-in replacement for titles that already support PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), the upscaler that shipped on the PS5 Pro.
Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are the first games to use it, both receiving patches that add QSSR as an additional graphics option. The Complete Edition of Ghost of Yōtei also launched the same day.
There is a catch. The base PS5 has no dedicated machine-learning silicon, so QSSR runs a leaner neural network than PSSR. Reported from Digital Foundry's early hands-on, Sony's principal graphics R&D engineer Daniel Craig said that PS5 Pro developers "almost uniformly output to 4K and adjust render resolution beneath it", while on the standard PS5 teams have to tune intermediate and final presentation targets as well, because they cannot rely on the same fixed 4K output. Digital Foundry's early impression suggests players on the base console should expect closer to an upscaled 1440p rather than the upscaled 4K the Pro can reach.
What makes QSSR notable is not raw quality but reach: Sony says the library needed only a few days of tuning to work as a drop-in for existing PSSR titles, which raises the odds that developers with PSSR support will enable it for the far larger installed base of standard PS5 consoles instead of maintaining separate code paths.
