AMD FSR 4, the latest version of the upscaling technology made by AMD, was co-developed with Sony. The news came in a tweet pushed by AMD itself, where it was added that this is just the beginning:
Happy Radeon Day! We’re proud to collaborate with PlayStation on Project Amethyst!
FSR 4 is looking fantastic! Excited for the co-development with Sony Interactive Entertainment on the models used for the AMD FSR 4 upscaler. This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for what’s next!
For those who may not remember, the joint machine learning project Amethyst was announced in late 2024 by Sony. In an exclusive Wccftech interview with Mark Cerny, the PlayStation 5 Pro System Architect explained:
Pretty much when PlayStation 5 Pro was wrapping up, we began discussions and development of those various aspects of Amethyst. To get more specific, I think we were getting pretty good momentum by the end of 2023. But as you know, it takes a phenomenally long amount of time to go from discussions and concepting to actually having a piece of hardware out in the marketplace.
We're looking to co-develop performant new AI architectures that can be used freely in any space that anybody chooses to use them, whether that is PC, console, or cloud. For the software, if I look at it today, we have games that run on a TV and there's a certain set of developers that make them, and AMD for PC has games that run on PC monitors that have a somewhat overlapping set of developers that make games for them. There are different needs and different relationships there, so really what we're looking to do is to co-develop those network architectures and those training strategies that can then be freely used in both contexts.
The collaboration is specifically on the AI models, then. It's the big AMD FSR 4 change, after all. FSR 1 was just a spatial upscaler, whereas FSR 2 switched to a temporal upscaler. Neither could possibly perform as well as an AI model, though, which has now been proven with the launch of FSR 4, described as a massive improvement over FSR 3. Of course, the trade off is that AMD had to restrict it to the new Radeon RX 9000 Series, just like NVIDIA has been doing with DLSS and its GeForce RTX Series.
Still, AMD should definitely be commended for its efforts to catch up with NVIDIA. While the DLSS 4 transformer model remains the gold standard for upscaling, AMD FSR 4 has reduced that gap considerably, a far from easy feat to accomplish given NVIDIA's headstart. The increased competition in the space will no doubt spur NVIDIA to further improvements and so on, eventually benefiting all users.
