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The PS5's Free AI Upscaling Is Real, and There Is Almost Nowhere to Use It
Based on reporting from Engadget
If it is free, I will take it. That was my first reaction to QSSR and it still is. The question right behind it is the one Sony did not answer: are those real pixels?
No. Quick Spectral Super Resolution, announced on October 1, rebuilds the image from a lower internal resolution. It comes out of Project Amethyst, Sony’s work with AMD, and it is a lighter version of PSSR, the upscaler on the PS5 Pro, with a simplified neural network and an implementation hand tuned for the base console. Sony still calls PSSR the gold standard on the Pro, and published no performance numbers of its own.
Not magic, then, and not nothing either. Digital Foundry’s analysis of Marvel’s Wolverine says the quality boost can be exceptional: a more stable image, more detail, better sub-pixel integrity and far fewer artifacts in moving vegetation. In Ghost of Yōtei the gain is smaller, because that game already looked very good on a base PS5.
It does cost something. Digital Foundry measured roughly 1.5 to 1.8 ms more per frame, which Richard Leadbetter calls reasonable for machine learning upscaling on hardware with no machine learning acceleration. In one uncapped Performance mode cutscene in Wolverine that worked out to a drop of 8 to 10 fps, and the cost grows as the output resolution rises. In the 60fps modes with dynamic resolution he found performance practically identical with it on or off.
On input lag, which is the part I actually worried about: nobody has published latency figures, Sony included, and extra frame time is not the same thing as extra latency. I do not know. Going by how it behaves in the 60fps modes, it should not be the thing that ruins your evening, but that is inference from the specs, not something I measured.
The real catch is the library. Seventeen days after the announcement there are still exactly two games with QSSR: Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei. Sony says it will offer it to every PlayStation developer, but each studio has to add it game by game, and old games may never get it. A free upgrade you cannot use in whatever you are playing tonight is a press release, not an upgrade.
So, do I buy a PS5 Pro? Not now, and that is the real news here. If software can pull this much out of the base console for nothing, the hardware gap gets smaller and the Pro can wait. Turn QSSR on in the two games that have it, look at your own TV, and decide from there.
