In addition to improved hardware, the PS5 Pro also comes with the PSSR upscaling tech to allow it to, on paper, output graphics for games with Quality preset graphics and Performance framerates simultaneously. But it looks like the console is getting an upscaling tech upgrade, as Digital Foundry reports that the console may be getting “something very similar to FSR 4’s upscaler … as the next evolution of PSSR”.
The report notes an AMD announcement that FSR 4 was co-developed with Sony as part of what is called the Project Amethyst initiative. While not exactly because of this, but PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny says that the PS5 Pro’s ML hardware will be able to handle FSR 4 “without significant re-architecting”. This is despite the new hardware AMD announced – the RX 9070 series – being of a much higher spec than what’s in the PS5 Pro.
Quoted in the report is Cerny saying “The peak performance number for PS5 Pro is 300 8-bit TOPS without sparsity, which compares very well to the recently released AMD GPUs. We don’t believe sparsity is useful for this particular upscaling algorithm”.
For context, sparsity is referring to a feature of machine ML hardware that’s supported in the new RDNA 4 architecture that the new AMD GPUs use, but not supported on the PS5 Pro. What it does is skipping or reducing a significant portion of the data or computations in a neural network for better efficiency. The report speculates that it’s tech used by NVIDIA to increase DLSS performance in the RTX 30-series of cards.
On one hand, it all sounds like pretty good news for those who thought that the PS5 Pro didn’t really push the envelope in terms of graphical performance. But on the other, this will likely only benefit titles released in 2026, and game devs are currently still encouraged to use PSSR. Beyond that, it would likely be up to individual devs to decide if it’s worth going through the trouble of giving their older games “the next evolution of PSSR”.
(Source: Digital Foundry)
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