QSSR brings AI upscaling to the standard PS5

Sony unveiled QSSR on 1 October, a lighter take on the AI upscaling that until now only the PS5 Pro could offer. The idea is to take a game image rendered at a lower resolution and rebuild the missing detail as it scales up. Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are already using it on the standard PS5, as an extra graphics option added this week. Sony is upfront that the Pro keeps the edge. For the vast majority of players, who never bought the Pro model, it’s still a welcome upgrade at no cost.

At a glance

QSSR, the little sibling of the PS5 Pro’s PSSR

To see what QSSR changes, it helps to go back to PSSR, the technology that launched with the PS5 Pro. It studies each frame pixel by pixel and uses AI to upscale it with more detail and less shimmer than a conventional method. Until now, that workload was simply too heavy for the standard console. Daniel Craig, a principal engineer in Sony Interactive Entertainment’s graphics research team, sets out the background in his post on the PlayStation Blog.

QSSR, short for Quick Spectral Super Resolution, is pitched as a new performance tier for that upscaling. It comes out of Project Amethyst, Sony’s graphics and AI partnership with AMD. Two changes make it possible: a slimmed-down neural network and an implementation tuned by hand to squeeze the most out of the console.

Sony is careful about expectations. In its own words, PSSR remains the gold standard on PS5 Pro, and the new version promises noticeable gains in image detail and stability on the base machine. So expect a cleaner picture than before on a regular PS5, short of what the Pro manages.

Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei switch to QSSR this week

Both launch titles come from Sony’s own studios. Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei were patched on 1 October to add QSSR to their graphics options on PS5. According to Push Square, the Wolverine update goes a step further and turns the feature on by default on the base console.

Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Insomniac Games, says the technology “adds more pixel-level clarity and stability” to the streets of Madripoor and the alleyways of Shinjuku. He calls it “a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience” for players on the standard machine. Anyone who read our Marvel’s Wolverine review will know the game already looked sharp, though the city should hold up better when the camera is on the move.

Over at Sucker Punch, Jasmin Patry, lead rendering engineer on Ghost of Yōtei, singles out the fine detail in characters and landscapes. He describes a level of stability over time that simply hadn’t been possible on the standard PS5 before. The studio adds that it had long hoped to give every player what PSSR delivers on the Pro.

What QSSR means if you own a standard PS5

The most important line comes at the end of the post. Sony says QSSR will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers. In other words, today’s two games open a list that should grow over the coming months. No schedule and no further titles have been named so far.

The timing fits a company keen to stretch the life of its console. Sony has been sounding out its players on their habits lately, as shown by its recent survey about PS5 discs. With this update, a large share of the installed base gets a free image boost without buying new hardware.

Honestly, the proof will come game by game. AI upscaling depends heavily on how each studio implements it, and a poorly tuned option can leave artefacts on hair, foliage or particle effects. The first comparisons on Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei will quickly show whether the promise holds on a 2020 console. For anyone still weighing up a PS5 Pro, it’s one less reason to reach for the wallet.