Following the confirmation that AMD FSR 4 had been co-developed with Sony as part of the wider machine learning Project Amethyst collaboration, PlayStation 5 Pro System Architect Mark Cerny revealed today in an interview with Digital Foundry that AMD's latest upscaling technology will be introduced to the most powerful console currently on the market in 2026.
This year, Sony plans to focus on helping developers implement the current version of PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), but they are already working on the future implementation of AMD FSR 4, or rather, its equivalent tailored for the PS5 Pro console:
Our target is to have something very similar to FSR 4's upscaler available on PS5 Pro for 2026 titles as the next evolution of PSSR; it should take the same inputs and produce essentially the same outputs. Doing that implementation is rather ambitious and time consuming, which is why you haven't already seen this new upscaler on PS5 Pro.
RDNA 4 and the hardware in PS5 Pro are completely separate designs, which is why I speak in terms of 'reimplementation' on PS5 Pro when I talk about the new upscaling network used in AMD FSR 4. I’m definitely looking forward to a future with co-developed hardware features for machine learning that will dramatically increase the interoperability.
When questioned about whether the console could handle the increased computational cost of AMD FSR 4, Cerny expressed confidence that the PS5 Pro's 300 8-bit TOPS would make it work. Later in the Q&A, the programmer and game designer returned to discuss both short-term and long-term objectives that are part of Project Amethyst (revealed a few months ago):
The shorter-term goal is to co-develop neural network architectures and training strategies for game graphics. The longer-term goal is to work together to create a more ideal hardware architecture for machine learning, something capable of processing the neural networks needed for game graphics at high speed. PS5 Pro was a wonderful learning experience for us here at SIE, and of course, AMD has an incredible amount of knowledge from its multi-generation RDNA roadmap. Again, it just makes sense to combine those expertises. [...] AMD FSR 4 and this next evolution of PSSR are a paradigm for our future. Going forward, we expect to have our own implementations of each of the algorithms developed through the collaboration.
Closing up, he added there might be quite a few tweaks because technical targets for console and PC games are quite different. For example, 60FPS is still believed to be the golden standard for consoles, while PC games aim much higher nowadays.
With FSR 4, AMD definitely closed the gap with NVIDIA, although the latest DLSS 4 transformer model and the GeForce RTX 50's Multi Frame Generation keep the Green Team ahead. Still, NVIDIA will have to continue investing in advancements, something that users should be thankful for.
