Sony brings AI graphics upscaling to the regular PS5

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

Sony is launching a new AI upscaling technology specifically for the regular PS5. The new tech, called Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), is a “new performance tier of AI upscaling” that’s a result of Sony’s Project Amethyst work with AMD, according to a blog post.

Sony says that PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which is available on the PS5 Pro, “remains the gold standard,” and in Digital Foundry’s early hands-on with the tech, it does seem that QSSR isn’t as fast as PSSR because the PS5 doesn’t have dedicated machine learning silicon. As a result, you should probably expect closer to an upscaled 1440p resolution on PS5 instead of the upscaled 4K on PS5 Pro.

”On PS5 Pro, developers almost uniformly output to 4K and adjust render resolution beneath it,” Sony principal graphics R&D engineer Daniel Craig told Digital Foundry. “On PS5, teams have to be more flexible, tuning not just render resolution, but also their intermediate and final presentation targets depending on the graphics mode.”

But Craig also said that QSSR is “fundamentally a drop-in replacement for titles that already support PSSR” after only a few days of tuning, making it likelier that PS5 developers will take advantage. The tech will be “offered broadly to all PlayStation developers,” Sony says.

Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei will be the first games to take advantage of QSSR, and are getting patches today to offer the tech as “an additional graphics option on PS5.” (Ghost of Yōtei Complete Edition also launches today.) Here are a couple videos from Sony showing off how QSSR looks in those games, and it appears to make graphics a little bit sharper:

Digital Foundry writes that “the potential here is remarkable: low resolution and poor upscaling have impacted so many titles in this generation, but QSSR could make a big difference.”

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