Sony has a “drop-in replacement” for PSSR coming to PS5 Pro in 2026
Sony’s Mark Cerny has revealed that “a drop-in replacement for the current PSSR” should be coming to PS5 Pro in 2026.
This will be part of the ongoing Project Amethyst partnership between AMD and Sony that began in 2023 and has seen the companies collaborate to improve their various temporal upscaling hardware. On the PlayStation side, that’s with the dedicated hardware for PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) on PS5 Pro, and on AMD’s side, the latest Radeon 9000 series GPUs now have hardware for FSR 4 (FidelityFX Super Resolution), which is a significant jump over the more general purpose FSR generations and widely seen as being much more competitive with Nvidia’s leading DLSS 4.
PSSR had a generally positive impact at release, but there were some notable issues with games like Silent Hill 2 having graphical glitching with PSSR added, and added unwanted noise in Darktide. So what’s great to hear is this reaffirmation that Sony is able and willing to deliver software updates that make use of the silicon dedicated to PSSR, but also the pace and extent of this partnership with AMD, which will deliver benefits to both PlayStation and PC (and let’s be honest, to Xbox as well).
“This is not for proprietary technology,” Cerny told Tom’s Guide. “This is really trying to move the industry forward. Obviously we want to use these technologies on our consoles, but these technologies are available to any of AMD’s customers freely.”
Two examples of the collaboration are that Sony helped AMD have more demanding graphical scenes within their research, to better mimic real games, while AMD had Sony set up a QA team for vetting algorithmic improvements. This built momentum such that the algorithm that is now core to FSR 4 was created within around 9 months.
And here’s the best news for PS5 Pro owners:
“The algorithm they came up with could be implemented on current-generation hardware,” said Cerny. “So the co-developed algorithm has already been released by AMD as part of FSR 4 on PC. And we’re in the process of implementing it on PS5 and it will release next year on PS5 Pro.”
He contineud, “It’s not a cut-down [version] of the algorithm. It’s the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution that we’ll be releasing on PS5 Pro.”
The tricky thing will be figuring out how to put this in the hands of developers. Will Sony be able to simply replace PSSR as it currently exists in games? Will it be down to developers to patch it in? Or will users have the ability to override a game’s PSSR, similar to FSR 4 overrides on PC?
Another element of Project Amethyst is the feedback loop of development for AMD’s graphics in general. Sony and Microsoft have previously collaborated with AMD to create the custom silicon within PlayStation and Xbox consoles, drawing upon the upcoming roadmap of CPU and GPU advancements to meet their demands and budgets. However, Cerny says that “Big chunks of RDNA 5, or whatever AMD ends up calling it, are coming out of engineering I am doing on the project. And again, this is coming out of trying to move things forward. There are no restrictions on the way any of it can be used.”
AMD has just released RDNA 4 GPUs in the form of the Radeon RX 9070 and 9060 cards. Already looking to the future, their next generation GPU will be called UDNA (not RDNA 5), with promises of another significant overhaul and step forward in their efforts to catch up to Nvidia’s dominance of upscaling and ray tracing techniques – ray reconstruction is a big new feature that significantly improves core details of ray-traced reflections and effects.
It’s also widely expected that UDNA will provide the basis for any new consoles released in late 2026 or 2027, with rumours that Xbox might try to get the jump on Sony.
Source: Tom’s Guide
