Sony brings AI upscaling to the standard PS5, starting with Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei

Sony Interactive Entertainment is bringing AI upscaling to the standard PS5. On October 1, the company announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR) and released patches for Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei that make them the first games to support the technology as an additional graphics option on PS5.

What QSSR is

QSSR is a new performance tier of AI upscaling developed within Project Amethyst, Sony's AI graphics collaboration with AMD. According to the PlayStation Blog, it rests on two innovations: a streamlined neural network architecture and a hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on the PS5. PSSR, the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution already offered on PS5 Pro, remains "the gold standard," Sony says, while QSSR brings notable improvements to image detail and stability on the standard console.

Sony has offered PSSR on the PS5 Pro for two years, and players and developers had asked whether it could reach the less powerful PS5. Until now, PSSR's computational demands made that impossible.

First games and developer reaction

Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Wolverine developer Insomniac Games, said QSSR "adds more pixel-level clarity and stability" to the game's environments, bringing out extra detail in Madripoor's busy streets and Shinjuku's dense alleyways. He called it a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience for PS5 players.

Jasmin Patry, lead rendering engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, said QSSR excels at resolving fine details in characters and environments with a level of temporal stability that had not been possible on the PS5 until now. The team had long wished all PS5 players could experience the image quality PSSR brings to PS5 Pro, he added, and QSSR is a positive step toward that goal.

Why it matters

In an early hands-on, Digital Foundry found that QSSR is not as fast as PSSR because the standard PS5 lacks dedicated machine learning silicon, so players should expect closer to an upscaled 1440p instead of the 4K seen on PS5 Pro. Sony principal graphics R&D engineer Daniel Craig told Digital Foundry that QSSR is "fundamentally a drop-in replacement" for titles that already support PSSR after only a few days of tuning.

Digital Foundry wrote that the potential is remarkable, as low resolution and poor upscaling have affected many titles this generation. Sony says the technology will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers.

Sources: Engadget · The Verge · PlayStation Blog