Sony brought AI upscaling to the regular PS5: QSSR already works in two games

The base PlayStation 5 did not have new hardware, but a feature appeared that was recently associated primarily with the PS5 Pro.Sony has brought AI image reconstruction to a regular console - at the cost of a lighter neural network and a few milliseconds of frame time.

The technology is called Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR).Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are the first to receive it: today's updates add a new upscaling option as a separate graphics mode.

How Sony fits an AI upscaler into a regular PS5

The technology was developed as part of the Amethyst project, a joint initiative between Sony and AMD in the field of graphics and machine learning.It is based on PSSR from PS5 Pro, but the neural network had to be simplified and a separate version of the algorithm had to be written for it.The PS5 Pro has dedicated hardware for such tasks with a capacity of about 300 TOPS, but the regular PS5 does not, so QSSR relies mainly on FP16 calculations and other optimization techniques.

The technology will not replace PSSR: Sony says that it remains the same for PS5 Pro.QSSR's goal is different: to improve detail and eliminate flickering on the base console.

First games and measurements

The first measurements were made by Digital Foundry experts.In Marvel's Wolverine, QSSR noticeably increased image stability and detail, while in Ghost of Yōtei the effect was more modest: in terms of frame rate, the technology is almost equal to FSR 3 in performance mode with the number of frames unlocked.Sucker Punch's lead rendering engineer Jasmine Patri says that QSSR allows for better detail in characters and environments and maintains clarity in motion.

Performance price

This picture is not available for free.In Wolverine, when reconstructing from 864p to 1440p, QSSR adds 1.5 to 1.8 ms to frame time compared to Insomniac's own upscaler.In mode with an unlocked frame rate, this means a difference of 8 or 10 FPS, and in mode with a target of 60 frames, the loss is compensated by dynamic resolution.When outputting at 2160p, the load increases to approximately 4.4 ms.

Sony plans

Sony is going to open up the QSSR toolkit to all PlayStation developers.For games that already have PSSR, the migration shouldn't be difficult: Sony says the technology can replace PSSR without major code rework, although tweaking options like texture streaming could take a few days.