Sony has announced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), a new artificial intelligence (AI) upscaling library for the standard PlayStation 5 (PS5).
Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei were confirmed as the first games to use it, with both titles receiving patches on the day of the announcement that added QSSR as an extra graphics option. The news came in a PlayStation Blog post by Daniel Craig, Principal Engineer, Graphics R&D at Sony Interactive Entertainment, the company that runs the PlayStation business. In the post, Craig said players and developers had been asking whether similar image quality gains could come to the standard PS5 ever since PSSR launched on PS5 Pro.
According to the announcement, QSSR is a lighter version of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), the AI upscaling technology Sony launched on the more powerful PS5 Pro. Upscaling lets a game render at a lower resolution and then rebuild the image at a higher one, saving processing power while aiming to keep the picture sharp. Sony said PSSR checks each frame pixel by pixel and uses AI to produce a more detailed, stable image than conventional methods, though its heavy processing demands had kept it off the standard PS5.
QSSR came out of Project Amethyst, Sony’s AI graphics collaboration with chipmaker AMD. Sony said it relies on two main changes: a streamlined neural network (the AI model that handles the upscaling) and an implementation hand-tuned to get as much performance as possible out of the PS5. The company still called PSSR the ‘gold standard’ on PS5 Pro, but said QSSR delivers ‘some notable improvements’ to image detail and stability on the standard console.
What the developers 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,” said Mike Fitzgerald, Head of Technology at Insomniac Games, the studio behind Marvel’s Wolverine. Fitzgerald also described the technology as “a perfect companion to the launch of Marvel’s Wolverine” and said it brings “a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5.”
“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,” said Jasmin Patry, Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, which developed Ghost of Yōtei. Temporal stability refers to how steady an image stays from one frame to the next, with less flickering or shimmering on small details. Patry added: “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!”
What comes next for QSSR
Sony said QSSR will be offered to all PlayStation developers, meaning more games could add it over time. The announcement did not name any other titles or give a timeline for wider adoption. Fitzgerald said he was excited “for more games to make use of QSSR in the future.”
