Sony brings AI upscaling to the standard PS5 as QSSR, starting with Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei

QSSR is a lighter version of the PS5 Pro's PSSR upscaler that runs on the base console's GPU. Two first-party games added it on 1 October, and Sony says every PlayStation developer will get it.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Sony has brought a version of its AI upscaler to the standard PS5. In a PlayStation Blog post on 1 October, Daniel Craig, a principal engineer in Sony Interactive Entertainment's graphics R&D group, introduced QSSR, short for Quick Spectral Super Resolution. Until now PSSR, the machine-learning upscaler, has been a PS5 Pro feature.

Sony describes QSSR as a faster evolution of PSSR, built on a streamlined neural network with an implementation hand-tuned for the PS5. It comes out of Project Amethyst, the graphics collaboration between Sony and AMD. The post says PSSR stays the top option on the PS5 Pro, and that QSSR is there to improve image detail and stability on the standard console.

Two games first

Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei were patched on 1 October to add QSSR as a graphics option on PS5. According to PC Games Hardware, it is switched on by default in Wolverine after its latest update. Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Insomniac Games, said in Sony's post that it brings "more pixel-level clarity and stability" to Wolverine's environments. Jasmin Patry, lead rendering engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, said it "excels at resolving the fine details in our characters and environments."

Sony says QSSR will be offered to all PlayStation developers, and that more games are expected to use it. No other titles have been named.

What it costs

The base PS5 does not have the extra machine-learning hardware the Pro uses for PSSR, so QSSR runs on the console's existing GPU. That has a price. PC Games Hardware, summarising Digital Foundry's hands-on, reports that in Wolverine, upscaling from 864p to 1440p takes roughly 1.5 to 1.8 ms more per frame than the upscaler Insomniac used before. With the frame rate uncapped, that came to about 8 to 10 fps in the scene tested. In the 60 fps mode the game lowers its dynamic resolution to make up the difference, and at 4K output the cost rises to about 4.4 ms.

The same report says Craig called QSSR a drop-in replacement for games that already support PSSR, with a few days of tuning for graphics modes and texture streaming. That matters for how quickly it spreads: the games most likely to pick it up are the ones already patched for the Pro, rather than older PS5 titles with no PSSR support at all.

The Shortcut described the change as arriving in a PS5 system update. Sony's own post says it came through the two games' patches, not the system software.

Sources

Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment

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