Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for Sony PlayStation, recently provided Digital Foundry with an in-depth interview. While the full discussion is still pending release, initial details offer significant insights into Sony’s new PSSR upscaling technology for the PlayStation 5 Pro, its connection to the AMD-backed Project Amethyst, and how these advancements relate to FSR upscaling on PC platforms.
A key area of clarification sought by Digital Foundry was the precise relationship between Sony’s enhanced PSSR upscaling and FSR Redstone, AMD’s latest machine learning-driven upscaling solution for PCs.
Cerny confirmed to Digital Foundry, “To clarify a few things about the collaboration with AMD, the new PSSR uses the same core co-developed algorithm as FSR Redstone’s upscaling.” He also mentioned that this collaboration could eventually lead to frame generation capabilities on PlayStation platforms. “FSR Frame Generation is also based on co-developed technology (or as my good friend Jack Huynh puts it, ‘co-engineered technology’). I’m very happy with how that work is progressing, and an equivalent frame generation library should be seen at some point on PlayStation platforms,” he added.
For PC enthusiasts, the intriguing aspect lies in the PS5 Pro’s approach to AI-based upscaling. Cerny explained, “FSR Redstone and the new PSSR have somewhat different implementations due to the underlying hardware, e.g. FSR Upscaling uses 8-bit floating point, and PSSR uses 8-bit integer.” He further noted slight variations in MAC counts (mathematical operations) and training data, but believes these differences will not drastically alter the final output, providing an excellent opportunity to compare SIE’s and AMD’s refreshed models.
It’s important to remember that the PS5 Pro integrates AMD graphics hardware, often described as a hybrid of RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 architectures, enhanced with RDNA 4-derived ray-tracing capabilities and additional custom machine-learning features. Cerny underscored that the PS5 Pro’s matrix math implementation for ML-based upscaling specifically leverages INT8, contrasting with RDNA 4’s FP8 requirement for PSSR 2.
This focus on INT8 is particularly notable considering the accidental leak of an unofficial FSR 4 version, which featured an INT8 codepath. This leak spurred a community effort, via tools like Optiscaler, to enable FSR 4 support for older RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 AMD graphics cards on PC. This naturally leads to speculation about whether Sony’s INT8 PSSR 2 could inform or lead to an official INT8 ML-based upscaler for previous generation AMD PC GPUs.
However, this optimistic outlook might be premature. As previous reports highlighted when the PS5 Pro’s technical specifications emerged, it possesses significantly advanced INT8 hardware support. The PS5 Pro boasts an INT8 performance rating of 300 TOPS, a substantial leap compared to older RDNA generations. For instance, the Radeon RX 7800 XT achieves only 75 TOPS, and even the high-end Radeon RX 7900 XTX is rated at 123 TOPS by AMD.
In essence, there’s a considerable disparity in INT8 performance between the PS5 Pro and AMD PC GPUs preceding the RDNA 4 generation. Consequently, it’s not safe to assume that upscaling technologies developed to harness the PS5 Pro’s specific INT8 capabilities would be easily transferable or perform effectively on older PC graphics cards.
Despite this potential limitation for older PC hardware, Digital Foundry’s detailed analysis confirms that the latest machine learning-powered PSSR offers dramatic improvements over the original PSSR, which relied solely on spatial and temporal algorithms without machine learning.
Nevertheless, hope persists that AMD may eventually release an official version of FSR 4 or FSR Redstone specifically optimized for owners of older RDNA GPUs. Community initiatives like Optiscaler demonstrate the viability of such solutions, and given AMD’s robust financial performance fueled by server CPUs and AI chips, this remains a reasonable request from the gaming community.