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Sony has announced QSSR - Quick Spectral Super Resolution - bringing PSSR-style AI upscaling to the base PS5 in a huge coup for existing console owners. Games need to be updated to add support for QSSR, but two are already ready: Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei.
It was thought to be impossible for PSSR to work on the base PS5, as it lacks the dedicated AI upscaling hardware necessary, but Sony has managed to bring a version of the technology to PS5 that is performant enough to be worth using - hence the "quick" part of the name.
We've already tested QSSR and early impressions are excellent - but how does this work, anyway?
In short, the firms used a more streamlined neural network architecture to fit into the PS5's limited hardware acceleration, and a hand-tuned implementation that trades off accuracy for performance. PSSR ought to always produce better-looking results, thanks to running on 300 TOPS of dedicated hardware in PS5 Pro, but QSSR should in turn outperform existing software-based upscaling and anti-aliasing solutions on the base PS5, like industry-standard TAA, Epic's Unreal Engine TSR and AMD's FSR 3 - especially when it comes to image stability.
Here's head of technology Mike Fitzgerald at Insomniac Games, developers of Marvel's Wolverine:
"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."
And here's lead rendering engineer Jasmin Patry at Sucker Punch Productions, the studio behind Ghost of Yōtei:
"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!"
QSSR will be freely available for other PlayStation developers to implement now that it's officially been unveiled, and ought to be widely adopted. Any game with PSSR support can add QSSR support very easily, almost as a drop-in replacement that only requires some settings tweaks to suit the new level of performance.
Games that don't support PSSR can also be retrofitted with slightly more development work, and of course studios with upcoming PlayStation releases can also take QSSR into account much earlier in the development process to make full use of the tech. For example, I suspect the authors of Grand Theft Auto 6 could have just enough time to integrate QSSR if they so choose.
We have much more detail in our QSSR feature, based on several conversations with Sony engineers, so I'd encourage you to read that next if you haven't already.
What do you make of the news? Let me know in the comments below.