"AI upscaling is coming to PS5": Sony's base console is getting its own version of a PS5 Pro feature

For almost two years, I've watched various friends, family members, and co-workers adopt the PS5 Pro, and I've largely been managing my jealousy with one notable exception: PSSR. The PS5 Pro's AI-powered upscaling tech is genuinely next-gen stuff, and makes games that already look exceptional on the base PS5 appear noticeably sharper and more detailed. It's not so impressive that I want to spend $900 to upgrade to the PS5 Pro, but it's enough to make my six-year-old PS5 look even dustier than it really is, and let me tell you folks, it's pretty dusty up in there.

Anyway, my face turned an ever-so-slightly milder shade of green today when Sony announced that "AI upscaling is coming to PS5." At first, I thought, the PS5 console family already has AI upscaling, it's just limited to the PS5 Pro, but no, Sony is bringing the tech to the base, vanilla PS5. It's not PSSR though, it's "a new performance tier of AI upscaling" called QSSR, which stands for Quick Spectral Super Resolution.

"Since the launch of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) on PS5 Pro, players and developers have asked whether similar image-quality improvements could be brought to the PS5 console," says SIE principal engineer of graphics R&D, Daniel Craig in a new PlayStation Blog. "PSSR analyzes game images pixel by pixel and uses AI to upscale them with more detail and stability than conventional approaches; until now, its computational demands made bringing that experience to PS5 impossible."

Sony says QSSR is made possible by two key innovations: a "streamlined neural network architecture" and "a hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on PS5," which work together to provide "some notable improvements to both image detail and image stability on PS5."

If you, like me, are keen to know exactly how "notable" these improvements are to the naked eye, here's a good comparison video showing Marvel's Wolverine in Fidelity Mode with and without QSSR. Watching the video, I'm encouraged that I don't have to squint even a little bit to see a very obvious increase in detail and clarity in background environments.

Only two games are confirmed to be taking advantage of QSSR right now: Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, which Sony says are both getting patches today. No other titles have been confirmed for QSSR support.

"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," says Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Insomniac Games. "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."

Meanwhile, Sucker Punch lead rendering engineer Jasmin Patry says "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." You can see how the tech upgrades character models and environments in Ghost of Yotei in the below video:

I'm eager to see how quickly other games and developers adopt QSSR and how widely the tech is applied to the PS5's back catalog, but for now I'm giving Sony its flowers for what seems like a genuinely meaningful upgrade to the base PS5 even as it nears its sixth birthday. It's not all too often you see a hardware manufacturer add new features to a console with a newer, pricier successor, as usually they want to encourage people to adopt the most current version, so I'm tentatively encouraged by this.

It's also worth drawing a very significant distinction between PSSR and QSSR and something like Nvidia's DLSS 5, which is rightfully drawing sharp criticism for using gen-AI to dramatically retool a game's actual assets, lighting, character designs, environments, etc. Basically, PSSR and QSSR sharpen up what's already there, while DLSS 5 can tinker with artistic intent, which is where the controversy comes from. The fact that all three of the above-listed features are AI upscalers has the unfortunate effect of tarring an otherwise innocent and impressive console feature with the muddy, stinky brush of gen-AI.

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