FSR 4 and PlayStation

[the-pi-guy]

Eurogamer

Last week, AMD released its new wave of graphics hardware, developed around the new RDNA 4 architecture. Machine learning performance is dramatically increased, opening the door to FSR 4 - a brand-new ML-based upscaler that delivers excellent quality, comparable to Nvidia's DLSS. Just after launch, AMD revealed that it was co-developed in association with Sony as part of its Project Amethyst initiative and in an interview with Digital Foundry, PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny says that "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."

"The neural network (and training recipe) in FSR 4's upscaler are the first results of the Amethyst collaboration," Cerny told us. "And results are excellent, it's a more advanced approach that can exceed the crispness of PSSR. I'm very proud of the work of the joint team!"

You can assess the quality of FSR 4 yourself via the embedded video below, where Digital Foundry stacks up the new upscaler against the non-ML FSR 3.1, along with DLSS 3.7 and DLSS 4.0. While we have more in-depth coverage to come, our take on the new technology is that it represents a huge leap over FSR 3.1, delivering quality wins over DLSS 3.7. While there are elements where the new transformer-based DLSS 4 model wins out, we were delighted to see that FSR 4 is surprisingly competitive against Nvidia's latest.

However, it is going to take some time to see the new technology migrate across to PlayStation 5 Pro. "Our focus for 2025 is working with developers to integrate PSSR into their titles; in parallel, though, we have already started to implement the new neural network on PS5 Pro. 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."

Cerny believes that PS5 Pro's ML hardware is up to the task of running FSR 4 without significant re-architecting.

"That is what we are targeting, and we believe we can achieve it," he says. "The peak performance number for PS5 Pro is 300 8-bit TOPS without sparsity, which compares very well to the recently released AMD GPUs. We don't believe sparsity is useful for this particular upscaling algorithm."

"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 FSR 4. I'm definitely looking forward to a future with co-developed hardware features for machine learning that will dramatically increase the interoperability."

[the-pi-guy]

[the-pi-guy]

[the-pi-guy]

AMD confirms FSR 4 tech was co-developed with Sony
– AMD's latest upscaling tech got a big boost from Sonyhttps://t.co/LHwDm13AHN pic.twitter.com/JvaYkB9jsQ

— TechSpot (@TechSpot) March 10, 2025

[Legend]

I wonder how long till DLSS and FSR are integrated with raytracing and pathtracing. AI denoising has been incredibly powerful and integrating it with the upscaler could be even more powerful.