Technology does trickle down eventually, as PlayStation announced a version of its upscaling tech now available on the base PS5.
The PS5 Pro featured PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), an AI upscaling feature equivalent to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. This is one of the good, practical uses of AI as these allows games to be presented at a higher resolution by rendering it at a lower resolution and letting AI add details based on established training data.
(DLSS 5 is an exception, as in some use cases it can add questionable details that may or may not be the intended artistic intention.)
PlayStation, through their continuing collaboration with AMD through Project Amethyst, have developed Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR). This is a “quick new evolution of PSSR” which has a streamlined neural network architecture, allowing it to be run on the less powerful base PS5. There’s also “hand-tuned implementation that maximises performance on PS5.” In other words, not just a copy-paste of a less performance-crunching PSSR on the base PS5.
QSSR is being rolled out to two games right now, Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost Of Yōtei. Fidelity Mode with QSSR in Wolverine allows far-off details to appear clearer (the poster for laksa isn’t as blurry). Meanwhile the foliage in Ghost Of Yōtei seems to be more dense in appearance when rendering in Raytracing mode with QSSR.
Be sure to run the video samples at the highest resolution and in full screen to really see the difference in detail. The difference in quality is marginal, but if you’ve seen enough games rendered in real-time, they can appear a little different with viewed directly compared to a captured feed of the same footage.
Whether there is any boost in visual quality in performance mode, prioritising 60 FPS, remains to be seen.
PSSR is exclusively available on the PS5 Pro, and the upscaler can essentially make you not really choose between 60 FPS performance or 4K resolution as it can do both, with ray tracing effects on too boot. Some games even can go up to 120 FPS.
It is still odd that the selling point of beefier console variants and graphics cards is that it has software that can do the heavy lifting instead of consumers buying them for their sheer raw, pure rasterising prowess. But the fact that upscaling tech is getting trickled down to the playerbase that will surely benefit it more, those on less powerful hardware, is something to be celebrated. It’s a free performance boost, should the developers make use of it.
More first-party PlayStation titles will be rolling out support for QSSR.