Sony has revealed Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), an adapted version of the PS5 Pro‘s PSSR and Project Amethyst that can run on the base PlayStation 5. QSSR has been patched into Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei, and is to be made broadly available to all developers on the system.
Where PS5 Pro has dedicated hardware for PSSR upscaling, which was updated this year to use a new algorithm equivalent to FSR 4 on PC, the PS5 does not. The GPU in the original PS5 is a generation earlier, and while it is capable of algorithmic AI upscaling, it is slower.
As part of their ongoing work with Project Amethyst, Sony and AMD has evolved PSSR with “A streamlined neural network architecture” and “A hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on PS5”. This last step was especially necessary, as the PS5 GPU trimmed out the INT8 function support from the RDNA2 chip family, and so QSSR relies on FP16.
You can really see the boost in detail and clarity which is possible using this:
What’s not clear right now is what the added performance burden will be for PS5 games. This will not be an automated drop-in replacement for games and will require a patch, though this should be able to tap into any work already done for PSSR. From that point, it will be about rebalancing the resolution, effects and frame rate targets to get the best out of QSSR.
In a like-for-like test from 864p upscaled to 1440p, Digital Foundry notes that there could be an 8-10FPS difference and increased 1.5-1.8ms frame time in Marvel’s Wolverine with standardised resolutions when compared to Insomniac’s internal IGTI upscaler. That’s still with the frame rate far above 60fps, though, and so a 60fps target with dynamic resolution still has benefits.
When replacing FSR3 in Ghost of Yotei, however, there was no appreciable difference in frame rates and frame time..
When many games still rely on the now antiquated FSR2 for upscaling, QSSR should still provide significant improvements even if the underlying resolution and graphics are reduced in quality.
This development also bodes well for PC gamers still hanging on to Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. FSR4 was launched initially as a feature exclusively for the RX 9000 series which shifted to have a dedicated section of the chip for FP8 processing, but after work-in-progress code leaked online, pressure was applied to have AMD adapt FSR4 and bring it to their older generation GPUs.
The RX 7000 series now has a version of FSR4 equivalent to that used for PSSR, and with AMD promising that RX 6000 GPUs will get FSR4 in early 2027, this seems likely to be related to QSSR.
Source: PS Blog