Monday, March 10th 2025
PlayStation 5 Pro to Receive FSR 4-Based Upscaling Technology in 2026
Sony has confirmed plans to implement an advanced AI upscaling solution for PlayStation 5 Pro in 2026, based on AMD's newly released FSR 4 technology. PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny revealed to EuroGamer that the next evolution of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) will leverage the neural network architecture co-developed with AMD through Project Amethyst. "Our target is to have something very similar to FSR 4's upscaler available on PS5 Pro for 2026 titles as the next evolution of PSSR," Cerny stated. This implementation aims to maintain compatibility with existing frameworks while delivering significantly enhanced image quality. The collaborative initiative between Sony and AMD, which began in late 2023, has already yielded measurable results. FSR 4 represents the first tangible output from Project Amethyst, with Cerny noting that the technology "can exceed the crispness of PSSR" currently deployed on PS5 Pro hardware.
Sony's PS5 Pro features custom ML hardware delivering 300 8-bit TOPS of computing power without sparsity, which Cerny believes will be sufficient to handle the computational demands of the new upscaling algorithm. While the reimplementation process is described as "ambitious and time-consuming," the underlying architecture appears capable of supporting the technology without significant modifications. For 2025, Sony's priority remains to encourage developers to integrate the current PSSR technology into their titles while the enhanced version undergoes development. Cerny indicated that console-specific optimizations will be necessary, as "technical targets for console game development and PC game development tend to be slightly different," particularly regarding frame rate consistency. Project Amethyst extends beyond upscaling technology, with indications that ray tracing enhancements may also be part of the collaboration. The partnership aims to establish a hardware architecture optimized for machine learning in graphics processing, giving us a hint of what the future hardware will be like.
Sources:
EuroGamer, via VideoCardz
Sony's PS5 Pro features custom ML hardware delivering 300 8-bit TOPS of computing power without sparsity, which Cerny believes will be sufficient to handle the computational demands of the new upscaling algorithm. While the reimplementation process is described as "ambitious and time-consuming," the underlying architecture appears capable of supporting the technology without significant modifications. For 2025, Sony's priority remains to encourage developers to integrate the current PSSR technology into their titles while the enhanced version undergoes development. Cerny indicated that console-specific optimizations will be necessary, as "technical targets for console game development and PC game development tend to be slightly different," particularly regarding frame rate consistency. Project Amethyst extends beyond upscaling technology, with indications that ray tracing enhancements may also be part of the collaboration. The partnership aims to establish a hardware architecture optimized for machine learning in graphics processing, giving us a hint of what the future hardware will be like.
16 Comments on PlayStation 5 Pro to Receive FSR 4-Based Upscaling Technology in 2026
Is PSSR is a spatial upscaler than? I had just assumed it was ML based.
BTW
There is already new release of Optiscaler which allows to mod in FSR4 and the result is staggering:
@remekra Optiscaler looks very interesting, thanks for the heads up.
As for backporting it to RDNA3, there is a whitepaper on what FSR4 is based on, would need to find a link but short version is that it's a hybrid CNN and Transformer model, image first goes through CNN and then after that through Transformer model. RDNA3 with it's AI Accelerators and instructions that it has would be able to run the CNN part of the model but not the Transformer model (RDNA3 doesn't support FP8), but they have developed it so that it can be split. There will be a loss of quality compared to full hybrid but it still will be better than FSR3.
Question is when they will implement it.Here is a comparison between FSR3 Quality and FSR4 performance:
They really knocked it out of the park with FSR4, I thought they would maybe be a little worse than DLSS3, or something on a level of DLSS2 but it's far better than that.
It's a shame they didn't release a xx80 class card, would have bought it instead of 5080 but well I hope with UDNA they will and I would gladly switch.