Sony just revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro, and the updated console, which will be released on November 7 for $699, comes packed with a feature PC gamers have enjoyed for years. It’s called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, and it’s an AI-assisted upscaler that Sony claims will end the debacle between Performance and Fidelity modes in most console releases.
Most console games use some form of upscaling today, rendering the game at a lower resolution in order to improve performance. There are a couple of key differences with PSSR, however. For starters, it uses machine learning. Sony says the PS5 Pro has dedicated machine learning hardware that’s tapped to perform the upscaling. That’s similar to what PC gamers have with Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses dedicated Tensor cores on RTX GPUs for AI-assisted upscaling.
In addition, it sounds like PSSR runs at a system level. It’s not clear if games will need explicit support for PSSR now, though Sony says that the console supports a library of 8,500 PS4 and PS5 titles that could automatically have performance or image quality improvements.
Most console games today use some form of temporal upscaling. This is where the game is rendered at, for example, 1080p and outputs to 4K. It works by rendering two frames and comparing them. Based on how objects are moving in the scene, the upscaling algorithm can step in to fill in the missing details. This type of approach is similar to something like AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), which doesn’t require dedicated AI hardware.
AI can make a massive difference in quality, though. As you can read in our comparison of DLSS and FSR, Nvidia’s feature comes out ahead in image quality due to its use of AI. Sony showed off some samples of what AI is doing with PSSR, too. As you can see in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart above, PSSR is able to render fine details of a scene much more cleanly than what’s available on the original PS5.
Similarly, in Spider-Man 2, the original PS5 washes out the fine detail in the trees in a mess of blotchy green colors. With PSSR on the PS5 Pro, there’s much more detail preserved in the upscaling.
Consoles, including the PS5, have seen some PC tech previously. In May, AMD brought its FSR 3 frame generation technology to consoles, and FSR upscaling has been supported on consoles for years. This is the first time we’re seeing AI-assisted upscaling on consoles, however. It should provide a massive boost to visual quality and performance if Sony is able to get close to what Nvidia has achieved with DLSS on PC. We’ll have to wait until the console is in our hands to know for sure, though.
