Sony put AI upscaling on the base PS5 — and it isn't DLSS

Sony Interactive Entertainment has brought AI upscaling to the base PlayStation 5. It's called Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), and it grew out of SIE's ongoing AI graphics collaboration with AMD.

QSSR uses a "streamlined neural network architecture" with a hand-tuned implementation to maximise performance on PS5, improving both image quality and frame rate. PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) stays exclusive to the PS5 Pro, which Sony calls the "gold standard" of the technology.

What it actually costs

Daniel Craig, SIE principal engineer for graphics R&D, gave Digital Foundry the unusually straight answer about why the base console gets a cut-down version:

The reality is that the PS5 Pro has 300 TOPS of dedicated hardware for this purpose and is free to pick a much more generous spot on that cost-versus-quality curve.

It's true that PS5 Pro was purpose built for the task, so QSSR relies primarily on FP16 math. A streamlined neural network architecture got us close but from there we leveraged a variety of less obvious hardware features to maximise efficiency.

The first games

The first titles to use it are Insomniac Games' Marvel's Wolverine and Sucker Punch Productions' Ghost of Yōtei. Sucker Punch's lead rendering engineer, Jasmin Patry:

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.

Practically speaking

Craig says QSSR is "fundamentally a drop-in replacement" for titles that already support PSSR, though tuning settings takes a few days — teams may need to adjust streaming settings so higher-quality mips stay resident. It will be offered broadly to PlayStation developers.

The same week, AMD's FSR 4.1 upscaling was reported to be coming to Xbox Series X|S. What used to be a PC-enthusiast argument has quietly become a console-baseline argument: on all three major platforms, the picture you see is now partly reconstructed by a model.