Sony has announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), a new AI upscaling technology for the base PS5 console. It emerged from Sony and AMD's collaboration on the Project Amethyst project, and the company describes it as a new performance tier for AI upscaling. The announcement was accompanied by patches for the first two games to support the technology.
What QSSR is and where it came from
According to notebookcheck.net, QSSR is a reworked version of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) technology familiar to PS5 Pro owners. Sony states that PSSR on the PS5 Pro remains the "gold standard." QSSR, however, is not as fast, because the base PS5 lacks dedicated hardware for machine learning. According to newsbytesapp.com, players on the PS5 can therefore expect upscaling to 1440p rather than 4K, while on the PS5 Pro it is 4K.
The first games with QSSR support
The first titles are Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei. Both games received patches on the same day Sony announced the technology, and QSSR is offered in them as an additional graphics option on the PS5. Ghost of Yōtei Complete Edition was also released the same day.
According to notebookcheck.net, Insomniac Games states that QSSR improves pixel-level sharpness and stability in Marvel's Wolverine, especially in densely populated environments such as Madripoor and Shinjuku. Sucker Punch mentions better rendering of fine details of characters and environments in Ghost of Yōtei, as well as better stability over time.
The difference from PSSR and availability
Daniel Craig, Sony's principal engineer for graphics research and development, said in an interview with Digital Foundry: "On PS5 Pro, developers almost uniformly render at 4K and adjust resolution below that. On PS5, teams have to be more flexible and tune not only resolution but also intermediate and final targets depending on the graphics mode." According to Craig, QSSR is "essentially a drop-in replacement that can be deployed in titles that already support PSSR," after a few days of tuning. Sony will offer the technology to all PlayStation developers.
According to newsbytesapp.com, however, it is not a system-wide improvement. QSSR is a per-game feature, and it is up to developers to decide whether to implement it.
Digital Foundry assesses the technology's potential in these words: "The potential here is remarkable: low resolution and poor upscaling have affected a lot of titles this generation, but QSSR could change a great deal."