Sony is bringing a lighter form of machine-learning upscaling, called Quick Spectral Super Resolution, to the standard PS5. Until now, that kind of upscaling had been tied to the more powerful PS5 Pro.
Key takeaways
- Sony has announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), an AI upscaling technology designed for the regular PS5 rather than the PS5 Pro.
- Sony calls QSSR a new “performance tier” of AI upscaling, which suggests a lighter version of its existing approach.
- According to The Verge, QSSR comes out of Project Amethyst, Sony’s technical collaboration with AMD.
- Key details are not yet known, including which games will support QSSR, when it arrives and how its image quality compares with PSSR.
Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR)
The Verge reports that Sony is launching QSSR specifically for the regular PS5, the standard model that most PlayStation owners have. Sony announced it in a blog post and described it as a new performance tier of AI upscaling. It is the newest member of a family of upscaling technologies that had previously been linked to Sony’s premium hardware.
Upscaling means rendering a game at a lower resolution than the screen shows and then rebuilding the image at a higher resolution. Drawing fewer pixels frees processing power. A game can spend that power on a steadier frame rate, more detailed effects, or both. Older upscaling methods use fixed mathematical rules to fill in the missing detail. Machine-learning methods use a trained model instead. The model predicts what the full-resolution image should look like, usually by drawing on information from previous frames as well as the current one.
The word “Quick” in the name, and Sony’s description of it as a performance tier, both point to a design trade-off. The base PS5 has less graphics hardware to spare than the PS5 Pro, so a model for it probably has to run within a tighter budget of computing time per frame. A lighter model can still improve image quality, but it may not rebuild as much detail as a heavier one. The available reporting does not say exactly how Sony has made this trade-off. It also does not give a resolution target, a performance figure or an image-quality comparison.
Several practical questions remain open. The source material does not say which games will support QSSR, whether developers have to add it to each game, whether existing games can be updated to use it, or when it will be available. Support for upscaling technologies on consoles has usually depended on each game, so how widely QSSR is used will probably depend on how studios respond. That point is an inference, though, and Sony has not confirmed it.
PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
QSSR has to be understood alongside its predecessor. PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, is the machine-learning upscaler Sony introduced with the PS5 Pro. It was one of the main selling points of the upgraded console. The Verge’s report mentions PSSR when explaining QSSR, and the new technology’s name clearly follows on from the earlier one.
PSSR was built to use the extra machine-learning hardware in the PS5 Pro. That link to hardware is why it had been unavailable on the standard console. Owners of the regular PS5 have so far relied on whatever upscaling each developer built into a game, often non-AI methods that vary in quality from game to game.
A lighter tier for the base console therefore changes how Sony offers its upscaling. It no longer looks like a feature reserved for the premium model. It now looks like a set of options matched to different hardware. The reporting does not make clear whether PSSR itself is changing as part of this announcement, or how the two technologies will sit together in games released on both models.
Project Amethyst
The Verge reports that QSSR is a result of Project Amethyst, a collaboration between Sony and AMD. AMD designs the custom processors inside PlayStation consoles, so the two companies already have a close technical relationship. Project Amethyst focuses on machine learning for graphics, an area in which both companies have a commercial interest.
For Sony, the collaboration supports its own platform features, such as PSSR and now QSSR. For AMD, work on machine-learning upscaling also matters in the PC graphics market, where AI upscaling has become a standard expectation. The source material does not say whether QSSR’s techniques will appear in AMD’s own products, or how much of the work each company contributed.
QSSR is also a sign of what the partnership is producing in practice. A collaboration announced in general terms becomes easier to judge once it leads to a specific feature for a console people already own.
What the set of announcements tells us
Taken together, QSSR, PSSR and Project Amethyst show a change in where console graphics improvements come from. Previously, a large visual upgrade usually needed new hardware, either a new console generation or a mid-generation model such as the PS5 Pro. AI upscaling makes software a bigger part of that equation. Once a model has been trained and tuned to run within a console’s limits, it can improve image quality on hardware that is already in people’s homes.
The announcement also hints at how Sony may handle a hardware range with different levels of power. With separate tiers of AI upscaling, the same broad technology can be adjusted to suit each model. The heavier version runs where there is more capacity, and the quicker one runs where there is less. This is similar to the PC market, where upscalers often offer quality and performance modes to suit different graphics cards.
For players, the effect depends on details that have not been published. These include how many games adopt QSSR, how its results compare with PSSR and with existing methods, and how soon it arrives. Its effect on the PS5 Pro’s appeal is also unclear. If the base console gains some of the Pro’s image-processing benefits, the difference between the two models may narrow, but how much is not yet possible to judge.
AI upscaling has become a standard part of game graphics on every major platform, and console makers are treating it as a long-term technology rather than a one-off feature. Sony’s choice to offer a version for its most widely owned console shows the technology moving from premium hardware to standard hardware.
Sources and further reading
- The Verge: a games-section report on Sony’s QSSR announcement and its link to Project Amethyst
- Sony Interactive Entertainment: the official PlayStation blog post announcing QSSR
- AMD: public material on its graphics technologies and its partnership with Sony
- General technical coverage of machine-learning upscaling in games, from specialist hardware and gaming publications
Surfaced from the rss:verge signal “console AI upscaling launch”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
