The chief architect of the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro gaming consoles, Mark Cerny, in an interview with the gaming publication EuroGamer stated that in the future, the proprietary PSSR (PlayStation Super Resolution) scaling technology for the PS5 Pro will be similar to AMD’s FSR 4 scaling technology for PCs.
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Last week, AMD announced that its FSR 4 scaling technology, developed using machine learning, was created with active assistance from Sony. In particular, when creating FSR 4, AMD used AI models developed jointly with Sony Interactive Entertainment. The two companies presented a joint development last year under the code name “Amethyst”. The goal of the project is to improve gameplay and graphics using artificial intelligence. The developments of the “Amethyst” project formed the basis of FSR 4. That same year, Sony introduced the PlayStation 5 Pro. The console is based on AMD’s RDNA hybrid architecture: the PS5 Pro processor’s compute unit is built on the RDNA 2 architecture, RDNA 4 is used for ray tracing, and a custom RDNA architecture is used for machine learning capabilities.
Not much is known about the latter component yet. However, in the future, it will be used for a scaling technology similar to FSR 4 on the PS5 Pro. According to Mark Cerny, this scaling technology will not be completely identical to FSR 4 on PC – it will be adapted for certain scenarios.
«Our goal is to build something similar to the FSR 4 upscaler for PS5 Pro in games coming out in 2026. This will be the next evolution of PSSR. Essentially, the technology should take the same inputs and produce similar outputs as FSR 4. Implementing this idea is quite ambitious and time-consuming, so we have not demonstrated this technology yet,” Cerny said.
He added that the “FSR4-like” scaling technology would need to be adapted to work on the console, for example, for a certain frame rate, which is not so critical for the PC. According to Cerny, the use of specialized hardware acceleration of AI in the PS5 Pro will provide computing power of 300 8-bit TOPS without taking into account sparsity. In his opinion, this is enough for the new scaling algorithm. Video cards based on the RDNA 4 architecture (Radeon RX 9070 series) demonstrate a comparable level of performance.
«”FSR 4 and the next evolution of PSSR will be the foundation for our future. Over time, we expect that AMD and Sony will have their own implementations of each of the algorithms developed through our collaboration. These may differ slightly from each other, as the technical requirements for developing games for consoles and PCs are generally different. For example, as I mentioned in the PS5 Pro technical video in December, a stable 60 frames per second is critical in the console world, while in the PC world it is less stringent,” Cerny said.
Cerny also noted that the company is currently focused less on integrating FSR 4-like technology into the PS5 Pro and more on expanding PSSR support so that as many games as possible can use it.