Sony Finally Brings AI Upscaling to Base PS5

AI upscaling continues to be a huge part of the modern graphics pipeline, and while PSSR brought this tech to the PS5 Pro, the base PS5 was left without it due to its weaker GPU. That's been remedied with QSSR.

In a blog post, Sony detailed a new upscaling model that runs on its base console called Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR. Just like the PSSR that debuted earlier this year on the PS5 Pro, QSSR was born from the Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD that kicked off last year.

The new model is much more lightweight than PSSR, and so it won't be quite as good at maintaining detail as PSSR is on the PS5 Pro, but it should be much more accurate than the temporal upscaling traditionally used on the console.

QSSR debuts in Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, and the respective developers seem pretty enthused about working the technology into their games. Sony's blog quotes Insomniac Head of Technology Mike Fitzgerald, who said, "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments, bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan’s epic journey. It’s a perfect companion to the launch of Marvel’s Wolverine, and it brings a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5."

Likewise, Jasmin Patry, the Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch, said: “At Sucker Punch, we’re excited to bring QSSR to Ghost of Yōtei players so that they can experience the world we’ve created with even more clarity and detail. QSSR excels at resolving the fine details in our characters and environments and does so with a level of temporal stability that hasn’t been possible on the PS5 console until now. We’ve long wished that all PS5 players could experience the incredible image quality that PSSR brings to PS5 Pro, and QSSR is a positive step towards that goal!”

The blog also shared a couple of clips from the respective games showing QSSR in action, compared to the standard temporal upscaling on the base PS5, and the results are promising. In Wolverine, the clip zooms in on distant buildings, and while the QSSR sample is still quite blurry – it is a watered down model, after all – it is able to maintain a lot more detail in fine objects than the standard clip on the left.

Then, in Ghost of Yotei, the camera zooms in on foliage in the foreground. In the original PS5 sample, the grass is almost a collection of floating green lines, with aliasing that cuts it up into sections. With QSSR enabled, the grass maintains its actual shape, even if it's still a bit noisy.

Obviously, the model running on the more powerful PS5 Pro is going to be better at maintaining image quality than QSSR ever will. But, the PS5 Pro will now set you back $900, and so this lighter model at least brings this upscaling to more people. Sony does say that it is making QSSR available to all developers, so I'd only expect more studios to use it going forward.

Still, we've only seen this model in action in a couple of clips on Sony's blog, so I'm not sure exactly how well it'll perform. Luckily, the patch for Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei will be going live later today, so I'll be able to see how well it holds up. But I do hope it works well, because QSSR could help bridge the gap for anyone who won't be able to afford a likely expensive PlayStation 6 for at least an extra few months.