Sony Brings Upscaling To The Base Playstation 5

When the PS5 Pro launched, Sony claimed it would be able to do fancy upscaling tricks to make your games look sharper and prettier..and that the base Playstation 5 wouldn’t be able to handle such an advanced technique. Looks like they found a way to do it anyway. What they call “QSSR” upscaling (standing for Quick Spectral Super Resolution) was just added to all PS5s today.

It looks like this:

“At Sucker Punch, we’re excited to bring QSSR to Ghost of Yōtei players so that they can experience the world we’ve created with even more clarity and detail,” puffs Jasmin Patry, Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions. “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. 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!”

So how does it work? In a blog post, Sony explained that QSSR “analyzes game images pixel by pixel and uses AI to upscale them with more detail and stability than conventional approaches.” They’re making it sound techier than it is, but what it means is that they just found a more efficient algorithm to generate upscaling than they’ve been using previously. It doesn’t take as much power yet produces the same result, so they’re putting it on all PS5s.

As for why they would be feeling so generous…well, yeah. Sony hasn’t made themselves look very good in recent months, and then there’s also that RAM shortage making it difficult to sell or even make new PS5 units. Sony’s CEO has suggested their strategy has pivoted to making money off their existing base rather than try to attract new ones, because they literally can’t.

Currently, only Ghost of Yotei and Marvel’s Wolverine support the QSSR upscale; apparently it has to be installed on a game by game basis. That means it would be up to third parties to add QSSR support on their own.