PSSR has been exclusive to the PlayStation 5 Pro since the console launched in 2024, but Sony is now bringing a lighter version of its AI upscaling to the base PlayStation 5. Announced today on the PlayStation Blog, Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR) is described as a new performance tier of PSSR. Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are the first games to use it, and both are being patched today to offer QSSR as an additional graphics option on the base console.
QSSR comes out of Project Amethyst, the AI graphics collaboration between Sony and AMD that also produced the upgraded PSSR PlayStation 5 Pro owners received in March. According to Sony, the computational demands of PSSR made it impossible to run on the base PlayStation 5, so QSSR relies on a streamlined neural network and a hand-tuned implementation built to get the most out of that hardware. Sony still calls PSSR the gold standard on PlayStation 5 Pro, but says QSSR offers notable improvements to image detail and stability on PlayStation 5. When ARC Raiders got upgraded PSSR on PlayStation 5 Pro in April, for example, the base PlayStation 5 version stuck with TSR upscaling.
Insomniac Games head of technology Mike Fitzgerald says QSSR adds clarity and stability at the pixel level to Marvel’s Wolverine, bringing out extra detail in places like the streets of Madripoor and the alleyways of Shinjuku. He also calls it a taste of the PlayStation 5 Pro experience for players on the base console. At Sucker Punch Productions, lead rendering engineer Jasmin Patry says QSSR excels at resolving fine detail in characters and environments, with a level of temporal stability that hasn’t been possible on PlayStation 5 until now. Sony says QSSR will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers, and it expects to see it in many more titles going forward.
When I reviewed Ghost of Yōtei last year, I stuck to the PlayStation 5 Pro’s Ray Tracing Pro mode and said it was hard to tell the image wasn’t native 4K because PSSR was doing some heavy lifting. I also reviewed Marvel’s Wolverine on a PlayStation 5 Pro last month, where I found performance to be great throughout and called its presentation the complete package.
