Sony brings QSSR AI upscaling to the standard PS5

PSSR, short for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, does that job with a trained neural network on the PS5 Pro, which launched in November 2024. Daniel Craig, a principal engineer in Sony's graphics research and development group, wrote the blog post announcing QSSR. "PSSR analyzes game images pixel by pixel and uses AI to upscale them with more detail and stability than conventional approaches," he wrote. Until now, he said, "its computational demands made bringing that experience to PS5 impossible."

Sony says QSSR comes down to two changes: "a streamlined neural network architecture" and "a hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on PS5." It grew out of Project Amethyst, Sony's graphics research partnership with AMD, which was first unveiled in late 2024.

The "quick" in the name is the whole point. Sony calls QSSR "a new performance tier of AI upscaling". In other words, it eats up less of the console's time on each frame, which leaves more room for the game itself.

Sony doesn't say it matches the Pro, though. "While PSSR remains the gold standard on PS5 Pro, QSSR provides some notable improvements to both image detail and image stability on PS5," Craig wrote.

How big a step it is

Digital Foundry has tested it, and it put the trade-off in plain numbers. In its news story, William Judd wrote that PSSR "ought to always produce better-looking results, thanks to running on 300 TOPS of dedicated hardware in PS5 Pro". The base PS5 doesn't have that dedicated hardware, so QSSR gives up some accuracy to gain speed.

On the base console, it's up against the non-AI methods games already use there. Judd named temporal anti-aliasing, Epic's Unreal Engine TSR and AMD's FSR 3. He said QSSR should beat them, "especially when it comes to image stability", and he called Digital Foundry's early impressions "excellent".

That's a real change for a console that's been on sale since November 2020. The PS5 Pro costs more, and plenty of people haven't upgraded. QSSR hands some of the Pro's picture-quality work to the far bigger crowd who own the original model or the slim.

The first two games

Both of the first games are Sony's own. Marvel's Wolverine, from Insomniac Games, came out on 15 September, according to Sony Interactive's launch release. Ghost of Yōtei, from Sucker Punch Productions, came out in October 2025.

Insomniac's patch, version 1.002, switches QSSR on by default on PS5, Push Square reported from the patch notes. The same update fixes interface, photo mode and visual problems. It sorts out progression issues and crashes "experienced by a small percentage of players". And it fixes accessibility problems with Navigation Assist, lock-on, high contrast and the screen reader.

Mike Fitzgerald, Insomniac's head of technology, gave Sony a statement for the blog. "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments, bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan's epic journey," he said. "It's a perfect companion to the launch of Marvel's Wolverine, and it brings a great taste of the PS5 Pro experience to our players on PS5."

In Ghost of Yōtei, QSSR shows up as an extra graphics option, not the default. Jasmin Patry, Sucker Punch's lead rendering engineer, said it "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." She added: "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!"

PlayStation put short official videos for both games on its YouTube channel the same day. The one at the top of this page is Wolverine's.

What happens next

Here's the catch. QSSR isn't a system-wide switch. Each game has to be updated to use it, so the games you already own won't change by themselves.

Sony's post doesn't say much about timing. "QSSR will be offered broadly to all PlayStation developers, and we look forward to seeing these improvements in many more titles going forward!" Craig wrote. It didn't name any more games.

Digital Foundry's reporting suggests it's easiest for games that already support PSSR. Judd wrote that adding QSSR to those is "almost as a drop-in replacement that only requires some settings tweaks". Games without PSSR need "slightly more development work".

That matters, because there's a growing pile of PS5 Pro-enhanced games. CD Projekt Red's free Witcher 3 remaster, which we covered when it was announced, lists PS5 Pro support and PSSR. The big releases due before Christmas are another obvious place to look. Grand Theft Auto VI arrives on 19 November, and Judd wrote that Rockstar "could have just enough time to integrate QSSR if they so choose". Rockstar hasn't said anything about it.

How to try it

If you've got a standard PS5 and either game, make sure the latest patch is installed. In Wolverine, QSSR's already on. In Ghost of Yōtei, you'll find it in the graphics options after the update.

PS5 Pro owners don't need to do a thing. Their consoles stick with PSSR, which Sony still calls the better option on that hardware.

The real test is how many studios pick it up. Sony's made the tool available. The next few months of patches will show whether it spreads beyond Sony's own studios.