One thing to stay up for: In keeping with critics, the PlayStation 5 Professional’s new machine studying implementation delivers noticeable enhancements over earlier console upscaling strategies however nonetheless leaves room for development. Because of Sony’s partnership with AMD, which not too long ago made important developments with FSR4, additional enhancements might start materializing as early as 2026.
PlayStation console architect Mark Cerny not too long ago informed Eurogamer that Sony plans to combine the neural community behind AMD’s FSR4 upscaler into the PlayStation 5 Professional’s PSSR approach beginning in 2026. This revelation comes only a day after AMD confirmed its collaboration with Sony on FSR4.
AMD’s newly launched Radeon RX 9000 graphics playing cards launched the corporate’s first machine learning-based upscaler, FSR4. Our evaluation exhibits that this new technique delivers considerably higher picture high quality than AMD’s earlier spatial and temporal upscaling methods, which at the moment are broadly utilized in console video games.
The PlayStation 5 Professional incorporates components of the Radeon RX 9000’s RDNA 4 structure for its machine learning-based PlayStation Spectral Tremendous Decision (PSSR). Nevertheless, its outcomes do not but match the standard of AMD’s FSR4 or Nvidia’s DLSS. Cerny defined that PSSR will extra carefully resemble FSR4 beginning subsequent 12 months, as Sony collaborates with builders to combine AMD’s neural community.
This transition will take time, as RDNA 4 and the PlayStation 5 Professional will not be equivalent. The primary RDNA 4 GPUs – the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT – belong to a better efficiency class than the PS5 Professional, which additionally lacks assist for sparsity. Sparsity is a key approach that helps RDNA 4 and Nvidia {hardware} optimize upscaling workloads. Nevertheless, Cerny believes the PS5 Professional can nonetheless obtain robust efficiency with out it.
Cerny describes the PlayStation 5 Professional as an early step in AMD and Sony’s collaboration to refine machine learning-based upscaling for future merchandise, possible together with the PlayStation 6. Sony advantages from AMD’s developments in AI, whereas AMD positive factors from Sony’s experience in sport optimization.
AMD has offered the structure for each the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and the PlayStation 6 is anticipated to proceed this development. Current experiences recommend that Sony’s next-generation console might arrive in 2027 or 2028, that includes a Zen 6 CPU and a GPU based mostly on RDNA’s successor, reportedly named UDNA.
In the meantime, the Nintendo Change 2 – anticipated to launch within the first half of this 12 months – might present one other compelling instance of ML-based upscaling on consoles. Using Nvidia’s Ampere structure from the RTX 30 sequence, the upcoming system would be the first handheld to make use of DLSS, or presumably a extra light-weight variation of it.
