Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR) on 1 October, bringing AI-guided image upscaling to the standard PlayStation 5 through technology developed in its Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD. Sony says Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are the first games to use the new library, with patches adding it as a graphics option on the same date.
Key points
- QSSR uses a streamlined neural network and an implementation tuned for the standard PS5.
- Sony says patches for Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei add QSSR as an optional graphics setting.
- Sony’s Daniel Craig says games already supporting PSSR can adopt QSSR after a few days of tuning, The Verge reported.
- Sony plans to offer the library broadly to PlayStation developers.
Project Amethyst reaches the standard PS5
PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, is available on the PS5 Pro. Daniel Craig, principal engineer in graphics R&D at Sony Interactive Entertainment, says its computational demands had prevented Sony from bringing the same approach to the standard PS5. QSSR is Sony’s lighter version: it combines a streamlined neural network architecture with an implementation tuned for the base console.
Upscaling starts with a game image rendered at a lower resolution and produces an image for a higher-resolution display. Think of enlarging a small photograph: making it bigger alone cannot supply the fine information missing between its original pixels. Craig says PSSR examines game images pixel by pixel and uses AI to produce more detail and steadier results than conventional upscaling. QSSR uses a streamlined neural network and a hand-tuned implementation to maximise performance on the standard PS5.
Playing through a scene with fine details could make the change visible in how clearly those details appear and how steadily they hold as the image changes. That would depend on the improvements Sony describes carrying through to a game’s QSSR graphics option.
Project Amethyst is Sony’s AI graphics collaboration with AMD, and Craig says QSSR grew out of that work. Sony calls it a new performance tier of AI upscaling rather than the same PSSR system running on another console. Craig says PSSR remains Sony’s preferred option on PS5 Pro, while QSSR improves image detail and stability on the standard PS5.
Drawing on an early hands-on by Digital Foundry, The Verge reported that QSSR appears slower than PSSR because the standard PS5 lacks dedicated machine-learning silicon. The publication expects output closer to upscaled 1440p on that console, compared with the upscaled 4K it describes for PS5 Pro. That expectation concerns likely presentation resolution, rather than a promised output setting for every game.
Two games take QSSR on 1 October
Sony says patches for Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei add QSSR as an additional graphics option on the standard PS5 on 1 October. An optional setting lets each game retain its other graphics choices while introducing the new upscaling library. The implementations also put Sony’s claims about image quality into two different game environments.
Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Insomniac Games, says the studio’s implementation in Marvel’s Wolverine gives its environments clearer, more stable fine detail. He points to busy streets in Madripoor and dense alleyways in Shinjuku, where small features in the picture must remain legible amid a great deal of visual information. That is the studio’s account of its own game’s use of QSSR.
Jasmin Patry, lead rendering engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, describes a related benefit in Ghost of Yōtei. Patry says QSSR resolves fine features in characters and surroundings while keeping them more stable over time than the studio had previously managed on the standard PS5. Stability matters in moving images because detail that looks clear in one frame also has to hold together as the view changes.
Craig describes a PSSR development path
For studios that have already integrated PSSR, Craig described QSSR as “fundamentally a drop-in replacement for titles that already support PSSR” after only a few days of tuning, The Verge reported. That account concerns games with existing PSSR support; the tuning still matters because the standard PS5 and PS5 Pro have different hardware available for the upscaling work.
Developers on PS5 Pro generally aim for 4K output and adjust the game’s initial render resolution, while standard PS5 teams must also vary intermediate and final presentation targets by graphics mode, according to Craig. A lower-resolution starting image leaves the upscaler more work to do, so the graphics mode remains part of how QSSR is implemented in a particular game.
Sony describes QSSR as a library it plans to offer broadly to all PlayStation developers. Fitzgerald says he wants more games to use it, and Patry calls the Ghost of Yōtei implementation a step towards giving standard PS5 players the image quality Sucker Punch had sought from PSSR on PS5 Pro.
