At the moment, the $700 PlayStation 5 Professional can already produce crisper, sharper, smoother, and extra secure graphics than a PS5, in case you sit shut sufficient to understand them. However beginning in 2026, the corporate hopes to imbue video games with a brand new AI upscaling system that’ll make them even crisper, based mostly on the AMD FSR 4 method that’s now transport with AMD’s new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics playing cards and seems to be aggressive in opposition to Nvidia’s newest DLSS as nicely.
“Our goal is to have one thing similar to FSR 4’s upscaler out there on PS5 Professional for 2026 titles as the following evolution of PSSR,” PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny tells Digital Foundry.
Many new PS5 Professional video games already use an AI upscaler known as “PlayStation Spectral Tremendous Decision” on their AMD-based chips. PSSR can flip 720p photographs into 4K ones on the fly whereas including additional particle results, and we’ve been comparatively impressed by its high quality in comparison with, say, FSR 3.
However Sony and AMD’s relationship didn’t cease there — it seems that the neural community that underpins AMD’s new FSR 4 upscaler was a part of a collaboration with Sony, too, and Sony now plans to backport a few of that work to its flagship PlayStation.
In December, Sony and AMD introduced a multi-year collaboration known as Undertaking Amethyst, one which we’re now studying truly started again in 2023, and Cerny tells Digital Foundry that FSR 4 was the primary fruit of these labors. “The neural community (and coaching recipe) in FSR 4’s upscaler are the primary outcomes of the Amethyst collaboration,” he says, calling it “a extra superior method that may exceed the crispness of PSSR.”
For now, although, Cerny says it’s nonetheless encouraging builders to make use of PSSR, as it can take time to “reimplement” FSR 4’s upscaling community into the PS5 Professional and its video games.
Cerny means that Sony could have “its personal implementations” of every algorithm it develops with AMD from right here on out. He additionally hints Undertaking Amethyst could also be about greater than dwelling consoles, although: “Now to be clear, this know-how has makes use of past PlayStation, and it’s about supporting broad work in machine studying throughout quite a lot of gadgets – the largest win is when builders can freely transfer their code from machine to machine,” he tells Digital Foundry.
You possibly can watch Digital Foundry’s comparability of FSR 4, and its deep dive on PSSR, beneath.