Today, the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro can already produce crisper, sharper, smoother, and more stable graphics than a PS5, if you sit close enough to appreciate them. But starting in 2026, the company hopes to imbue games with a new AI upscaling formula that’ll make them even crisper, based on the AMD FSR 4 technique that’s now shipping with AMD’s new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards and appears to be competitive against Nvidia’s latest DLSS as well.

“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,” PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny tells Digital Foundry.

Many new PS5 Pro games already use an AI upscaler called “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution” on their AMD-based chips. PSSR can turn 720p images into 4K ones on the fly while adding extra particle effects, and we’ve been relatively impressed by its quality compared to, say, FSR 3.

But Sony and AMD’s relationship didn’t stop there — it turns out that the neural network that underpins AMD’s new FSR 4 upscaler was part of a collaboration with Sony, too, and Sony now plans to backport some of that work to its flagship PlayStation.

In December, Sony and AMD announced a multi-year collaboration called Project Amethyst, one that we’re now learning actually began back in 2023, and Cerny tells Digital Foundry that FSR 4 was the first fruit of those labors. “The neural network (and training recipe) in FSR 4’s upscaler are the first results of the Amethyst collaboration,” he says, calling it “a more advanced approach that can exceed the crispness of PSSR.”

For now, though, Cerny says it’s still encouraging developers to use PSSR, as it will take time to “reimplement” FSR 4’s upscaling network into the PS5 Pro and its games.

Cerny suggests that Sony will have “its own implementations” of each algorithm it develops with AMD from here on out. He also hints Project Amethyst may be about more than home consoles, though: “Now to be clear, this technology has uses beyond PlayStation, and it’s about supporting broad work in machine learning across a variety of devices – the biggest win is when developers can freely move their code from device to device,” he tells Digital Foundry.

You can watch Digital Foundry’s comparison of FSR 4, and its deep dive on PSSR, below.

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