Sony adds AI upscaling to the standard PS5
Sony is equipping the regular PlayStation 5 with the new AI image enhancement QSSR. The technology often upscales games to 1440p and delivers significantly sharper details. The first patches for Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are now available.
AI upscaling for the PS5
Sony is providing gamers with new upscaling technology for the base version of the PlayStation 5. With Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), the console receives an AI-supported image improvement, which was previously reserved for the Pro model in a similar form as PSSR. Like the company in one Blog post announced, the first patches for the titles Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei have already been released. Quick Spectral Super Resolution for Marvel’s Wolverine (PS5)
Users can now activate the new graphics option in the game settings as an alternative. The developers at Insomniac Games emphasize that the technology in Marvel’s Wolverine better highlights details in busy environments, while Sucker Punch Productions emphasizes greater temporal image stability in characters and landscapes in Ghost of Yōtei. The system comes from the so-called Project Amethyst, a technical cooperation between Sony and AMD.
While the PlayStation 5 Pro has dedicated hardware for machine learning and relies on INT8 commands, the standard console has to make do without these special accelerators. QSSR therefore primarily uses FP16 calculations. According to Sony, the architecture uses a customized neural network structure and highly optimized mathematical instructions to maximize efficiency. Quick Spectral Super Resolution in Ghost of Yotei (PS5)
Compromises in presentation
Adaptation for regular console hardware requires adjustments. Developers are using 4K images as the output target by default on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Since the computing power of the base console is lower, QSSR often aims for an upscaled target resolution of 1440p. Nevertheless, the technology ensures significantly sharper details at the pixel level and significantly reduces image errors in elements such as waving plants. However, the image improvement is associated with a “purchased” performance cost, as can be seen Digital Foundry can read. When scaling from a base resolution of 864p to 1440p, QSSR in Marvel’s Wolverine is about 1.5 to 1.8 milliseconds slower than Insomniac’s in-house upscaler. In unlimited performance mode, this leads to differences of eight to ten frames per second compared to conventional methods.
However, if a dynamic resolution with a fixed target of 60 frames per second is used, the internal rendering resolution drops while the output frame rate remains stable. Scaling to 4K is significantly more computationally intensive at 4.4 milliseconds. Initial tests with Ghost of Yōtei also showed that the performance of QSSR is roughly equivalent to the implementation of FSR 3. Sony is now offering the tool to all PlayStation developers. According to Sony, studios that already support the PSSR system on the Pro console should be able to adopt QSSR as a direct replacement with just a few days of additional coordination effort.
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