PlayStation has announced new tech of the standard PS5 to somewhat shrink the performance gap between it and the Pro model. Where the latter has the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), the former is now getting Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR). Two games will benefit from this first – Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei – and both are getting patches to offer the tech as a new graphics option on the base model console.
While the PS5 is getting some of the benefits of the Pro model in that it’s getting “notable improvements to both image detail and image stability”, PlayStation maintains that “PSSR remains the gold standard”. Digital Foundry got an early hands-on with the tech, and said that “upscaling to 1440p is the more natural target for QSSR – which is what a lot of lower resolution PS5 games are doing anyway”.
Daniel Craig (not that one, obviously), Principal Engineer for Graphics R&D at Sony Interactive Entertainment, told the outlet that “QSSR is fundamentally a drop-in replacement for titles that already support PSSR”. This lines up with the first two games that get support for the tech being what they are. He then adds, “that said, tuning game settings takes a bit more time, perhaps a few days”. Back in the PlayStation Blog post, Craig also says that “QSSR will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers” as well.
On one hand, the PS5 Pro has a lot more graphical firepower, and dedicated machine learning hardware to run the full PSSR. The base model PS5 does not, so it’s pretty amazing that it still gets machine learning-based tech to somewhat close the output gap between the two. There’s no completely bridging it, but it still means an upgrade to those who play the games that benefit from the tech.
(Source: PlayStation, Digital Foundry)
