Sony's QSSR Brings AI Upscaling to Base PS5

Sony has launched QSSR, a lightweight AI upscaling model for the base PS5, debuting in Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei. It promises better image clarity than traditional temporal upscaling.

Ever felt like your base PS5 was missing out on the AI upscaling magic of the PS5 Pro? Well, Sony just dropped a solution that might level the playing field.

In a new blog post, Sony unveiled Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR. It's a new upscaling model that runs on the base PS5, and it's born from the same Project Amethyst collaboration with AMD that gave us PSSR on the PS5 Pro last year. Unlike PSSR, QSSR is much more lightweight, so it won't match the Pro's detail preservation, but it should be a big step up from the temporal upscaling the base console has been using.

QSSR makes its debut in Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei, and the developers are pretty excited. Insomniac's Head of Technology, Mike Fitzgerald, said, "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. 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." Sucker Punch's Lead Rendering Engineer, Jasmin Patry, added, "At Sucker Punch, we're excited to bring QSSR to Ghost of Yōtei players so that they can experience the world we've created with even more clarity and detail. 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. We've long wished that all PS5 players could experience the incredible image quality that PSSR brings to PS5 Pro, and QSSR is a positive step towards that goal!"

Sony also shared some side-by-side clips showing QSSR in action. In Wolverine, distant buildings look noticeably more detailed with QSSR, even if it's still a bit blurry compared to the Pro's PSSR. In Ghost of Yotei, foliage that normally turns into a mess of aliased lines holds its shape much better with QSSR enabled, though it's still a tad noisy.

Of course, the PS5 Pro will always have the edge with its more powerful GPU, but with the Pro priced at $900, QSSR is a welcome alternative for the rest of us. Sony says QSSR is available to all developers, so we can expect more games to adopt it down the line. The patch for Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei goes live later today, so we'll soon see how well it performs in practice.

Will you be trying out QSSR in these games? Let us know in the comments!