Sony Introduces AI Upscaling to Standard PS5

AI upscaling has become a vital component of modern graphics rendering, and while PSSR delivered this technology to the PS5 Pro, the standard PS5 missed out due to its less powerful GPU. That gap has now been filled with QSSR.

In a blog post, Sony unveiled a new upscaling model designed for its base console, named Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR. Similar to the PSSR that launched earlier this year on the PS5 Pro, QSSR stems from the Project Amethyst partnership with AMD that began last year.

The new model is significantly lighter than PSSR, so it won't match PSSR's detail preservation on the PS5 Pro, but it should offer much better accuracy than the temporal upscaling typically used on the console.

QSSR makes its debut in Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, and the developers behind these games are clearly excited to integrate the technology. Sony's blog quotes Mike Fitzgerald, Head of Technology at Insomniac, saying: "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments, bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan's epic journey. It's a perfect companion to the launch of Marvel's Wolverine, and it brings a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5."

Similarly, Jasmin Patry, Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch, commented: "At Sucker Punch, we're excited to bring QSSR to Ghost of Yōtei players so that they can experience the world we've created with even more clarity and detail. 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. We've long wished that all PS5 players could experience the incredible image quality that PSSR brings to PS5 Pro, and QSSR is a positive step towards that goal!"

The blog also shared a few clips from the respective games demonstrating QSSR in action, compared to the standard temporal upscaling on the base PS5, and the results are encouraging. In Wolverine, the clip zooms in on distant buildings, and while the QSSR sample is still somewhat blurry – it is a watered-down model, after all – it retains much more detail in fine objects than the standard clip on the left.

Then, in Ghost of Yotei, the camera zooms in on foreground foliage. In the original PS5 sample, the grass appears as almost a collection of floating green lines, with aliasing that fragments it into sections. With QSSR enabled, however, the grass maintains its actual shape, even if it's still a bit noisy.

Of course, the model running on the more powerful PS5 Pro will always outperform QSSR in maintaining image quality. But with the PS5 Pro now priced at $900, this lighter model at least brings this upscaling to more people. Sony does say that it is making QSSR available to all developers, so I'd expect more studios to adopt it going forward.

Still, we've only seen this model in action in a couple of clips on Sony's blog, so I'm not sure exactly how well it'll perform. Fortunately, the patch for Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei will go live later today, so I'll be able to see how well it holds up. But I do hope it works well, because QSSR could help bridge the gap for anyone who won't be able to afford a likely expensive PlayStation 6 for at least an extra few months.