While PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) is relatively fresh on the scene, it won’t be the upscaler of choice for future games on the console for much longer. Sony’s partnership with AMD is deepening, as the two brands are working together to bring FSR 4 to PlayStation 5 Pro in 2026.
PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny revealed plans to replace PSSR with FSR 4 in a recent interview with Tom’s Guide. He claims that AMD’s upscaler is a “drop-in replacement” for developers, which should greatly boost its adoption rate.
Cerny explains that the PS5 Pro implementation of FSR 4 doesn’t forgo any features, describing it as the “full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution.” By “co-developed”, he’s referring to Sony and AMD’s ongoing collaboration on ‘Project Amethyst‘ which led to the creation of FSR 4.
If PS5 Pro retains the same feature set as graphics cards like Radeon RX 9060 XT, then future games could support frame generation in addition to upscaling. This would help the console more easily take advantage of 120Hz panels that are becoming more commonplace in TVs, not forgetting high refresh rate gaming monitors.
In a welcome move, both AMD and Sony have agreed to keep their contributions non-proprietary. This would allow any AMD partner to leverage any and all advancements the companies discover. Perhaps we’ll see a next-generation Xbox console running FSR 4 (whatever Xbox actually means these days).
Looking further afield, this collaboration is also directly influencing the direction of AMD’s next GPU architecture. Cerny says, “big chunks of RDNA 5, or whatever AMD ends up calling it, are coming out of engineering I am doing on the project.” I’m curious to see how the influences of PlayStation and Radeon will weave into one another.
In the meantime, we’ve FSR ‘Redstone’ to look forward to later this year. This update should help plug remaining gaps between AMD’s upscaler and Nvidia DLSS, and should benefit PlayStation too.
