Sony has announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), a new artificial intelligence-powered upgrade library designed for the standard PlayStation 5. The first games to support this technology are Marvel’s Wolverine and Soul of the sheep’s hoof. For both, corresponding updates will be released today.
Image source: PlayStation
QSSR technology is based on PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), which is used on the PS5 Pro console. According to Sony, the new implementation is the result of Project Amethyst, a joint initiative between the company and AMD in the areas of graphics and machine learning. For the applicability of using AI for image reconstruction on previous-generation GPUs, an optimized neural network and a special version of the algorithm for the standard PS5 were developed.
The PS5 Pro console is equipped with dedicated hardware for machine learning tasks, which provides more computing resources for PSSR technology. The standard PS5 doesn’t have this hardware, so QSSR takes a different approach while achieving similar improvements in image detail and temporal stability (eliminating flicker).
Sony plans to make QSSR available to a wider range of PlayStation game developers. Implementing QSSR in a game that already supports PSSR shouldn’t require much effort. Sony representatives told Digital Foundry that QSSR can effectively replace PSSR without major code modifications, although it may take developers several days to adjust settings such as texture streaming.
Digital Foundry has obtained more technical details from Sony’s graphics R&D team. The PS5 Pro hardware can provide approximately 300 TOPS (tera operations per second) performance for tasks such as PSSR, and supports INT8 operations. Meanwhile, QSSR on the standard PS5 mainly relies on FP16 operations, but also uses packed math instructions and other GPU optimization techniques.
Game testing Marvel’s Wolverine Results show that when reconstructing images from 864p resolution to 1440p, using QSSR increases frame rendering time by approximately 1.5–1.8 milliseconds compared to Insomniac’s own upscaler. In unlocked frame rate mode this results in a difference of about 8-10 FPS, while in standard mode the target is 60 FPS, with the performance loss compensated by dynamically changing the resolution.
When testing QSSR with image output at 2160p resolution (the highest graphics quality mode in Marvel’s The Wolverine), the system load increased significantly. In this case, the increase in frame rendering time reaches approximately 4.4 ms. Sony has confirmed that developers can choose different rendering and output resolutions based on graphics mode, rather than focusing on 4K as the default standard for the regular PS5.
in the case of Soul of the sheep’s hoof The results were different. Digital Foundry has determined that QSSR delivers approximately the same frame rate as the game’s existing FSR 3 when unlocked in performance mode. With QSSR now available to all PlayStation game developers, Sony expects existing and future PS5 games to use the technology.
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