Sony’s been spending so much time and energy pushing the PlayStation 5 Pro as hard as it can go that it seemed that the six-year-old PS5 was getting short shrift. Now, Sony’s bringing a scaled-down version of its excellent console upscaling tech to the base PS5, and it may make your games look a little sharper on your 4K TV.
Sony first introduced its PSSR 2 update (Sony just refers to it as PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) on PlayStation 5 Pro consoles earlier this year. This took many existing games and ran them through a new upscaling pipeline that sharpened visuals and drastically improved performance, at least in some cases. At the time, Sony claimed the regular PS5 didn’t have the GPU horsepower to handle some of these upscaling improvements.
In a Thursday blog post, the console maker describes how the new Quick Spectral Super Resolution will give a few of your PS5 games the boost they deserve. It’s using the same collaboration between AMD and PlayStation, dubbed Project Amethyst, to improve the stability and image detail of its pixel-by-pixel upscaling. Sony says it managed to streamline its neural network architecture to make the AI-enabled upscaling work on its aging console hardware.
“While PSSR remains the gold standard on PS5 Pro, QSSR provides some notable improvements to both image detail and image stability on PS5,” PlayStation’s principal engineer of graphics R&D, Daniel Craig (no, not the actor, but you can still cue the Bond theme), wrote in the blog post.
Currently, the upscaling tech is only available on Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei. The tech is available to developers, so we’ll likely see it implemented in more games soon. Sony included a few handy videos of what this looks like in-game, and as you can see, it may be hard to spot the differences if you’re staring at your screen from across the room. Still, graphics puritans may appreciate the upgrade, especially if you want to play your games at the highest possible resolution and with the most demanding graphics settings.
The PlayStation 5 Pro currently costs $900 after the 2026 price hikes. Meanwhile, a base PlayStation 5 without a disc drive demands $600. Most people who own a console aren’t running out to spend $300 more on ever-aging hardware. It’s smart for Sony to throw regular PS5 owners a bone considering the whole game disc fiasco. In reality, it’s just a taste of what kinds of new upscaling tech we can expect with the eventual PlayStation 6 console and its rumored handheld.
