The PlayStation 5 Pro’s main promise is better, more stable graphics—there’s a reason why it costs a lot more than the regular Slim model of the console. Now, though, Sony is thinking about party tricks to raise the bar even further, and the latest party trick thought up by the company actually looks very, very nice.
Sony is planning a significant upgrade to the PlayStation 5 Pro’s graphical capabilities in 2026 using AMD’s FSR technology. Mark Cerny, PlayStation’s lead architect, has confirmed to Digital Foundry that Sony intends to integrate a version of FSR 4’s upscaler into the PS5 Pro for titles released in 2026.
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Game upscaling is not a foreign concept to the PS5. Many current PS5 Pro games already use Sony’s proprietary “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution” (PSSR) AI upscaler. PSSR is capable of transforming 720p images into 4K resolution in real-time, while also adding extra particle effects. It is a step ahead from AMD’s FSR 3 technology, which was included in graphics cards from AMD predating the company’s recent RDNA 4 release. FSR 4, however, included with the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT graphics cards, takes things a step further—the technology seems to be competitive with NVIDIA’s DLSS technology, which is a high bar to reach considering the state of that technology as of the release of the latest RTX 5000 series cards.
Cerny described the upcoming FSR 4 port as “the next evolution of PSSR” and “a more advanced approach that can exceed the crispness of PSSR.” He further added that Sony will develop its own implementations of algorithms co-developed with AMD. It might be FSR 4 on the inside, but it looks like Sony might tweak it so it works better with its own hardware and games. So when we do see this arrive on consoles, it will probably be marketed as a new version of PSSR—perhaps PSSR 2? He also stated that it would take time to “reimplement” FSR 4’s upscaling network into the PS5 Pro and its games. Therefore, Sony is currently encouraging developers to continue utilizing PSSR for existing and near-future titles.
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The GPU in the PS5 Pro is still RDNA 2-based, while FSR 4 is exclusive to the new RDNA 4 cards that are two generations ahead—and it’s probably exclusive because of generational improvements that would, in theory, make it difficult to backport it to previous generations of graphics cards.
It begs the question, then, how would Sony and AMD pull this off? Either it might end up being a limited port of FSR 4, or there are no technical limitations at all. If it’s the latter, there’s technically nothing stopping AMD from launching FSR 4 on its older RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 cards other than the company just not wanting to do it. It would be just AMD artificially holding back a feature for its newer cards so it sells more of them, which is something we’ve seen a lot in the past, but it’s questionable, nonetheless. NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 does rely on hardware improvements present on RTX 5000 cards that are not present on previous-gen cards, but to the company’s credit, it did try to do some backporting of newer DLSS 4 features to older cards. That’s a good move there.
These changes will supposedly arrive next year, presumably, so we’ll have to wait and see to make actual comparisons.
Source: The Verge
