PS5 Gains AI-Guided Upscaling With QSSR, Now Live in Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei

Sony has announced a new image-upscaling technology for the standard PlayStation 5 called Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR. The feature is already available in two games: Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei. Sony described QSSR as a streamlined version of the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) used on PS5 Pro, which it called the "gold standard" of AI-guided upscaling.

According to Sony's blog post, QSSR uses a hand-tuned implementation designed to maximize performance on PS5. In a comparison video for Marvel's Wolverine, the difference was clear, with close-up images appearing noticeably crisper and more detailed. "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments," said Insomniac's head of tech Mike Fitzgerald. "Bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan's epic journey."

Ghost of Yotei also showed improvements, with less blurry backgrounds and environmental detail. "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," said Sucker Punch's lead rendering engineer Jasmin Parry.

Digital Foundry tested QSSR and expressed enthusiasm, particularly for Marvel's Wolverine. "In terms of image quality analysis, suffice it to say that temporal stability is substantially improved, detail level increases, sub-pixel integrity is considerably superior, while artefacts from elements like moving foliage are much reduced," the outlet said. However, they noted that Ghost of Yotei, which already had decent image quality, saw less dramatic improvements.

The main achievement is that QSSR works on PS5 hardware without dedicated AI upscaling capabilities like PS5 Pro. Sony plans to offer QSSR broadly to all PlayStation developers following its experimental use in the two titles. It remains unclear whether the update is tied to a recent PS5 firmware release that includes security fixes and system performance improvements.