Thanks to the addition of computing units (60 instead of 36), the PlayStation 5 Pro benefits from a much greater firepower than its predecessor. It also benefits from the reinforcement of PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), the name given to Sony's upscaling technology. However, the Japanese company does not intend to stop there: it wants to evolve its PSSR by modeling it on FSR 4 for 2026 games.
A close partnership with AMD
This is what emerges from statements made by Mark Cerny, the console's chief architecture officer, to Digital Foundry. He declared: "Our goal is to have something very similar to the FSR 4 upscaler available on PS5 Pro for 2026 titles as the next evolution of PSSR." He adds that the progress made for FSR 4 thanks to "neural network and training methods" are concrete results of Project Amethyst. As a reminder, this name refers to the partnership between Sony and AMD. It focuses in particular on the development of machine learning solutions.
The goal is not to replace PSSR with FSR 4; rather to develop a PSSR 2.0 of sorts. And the reason is simple: FSR 4, the new version boosted by machine learning, is, until now, exclusive to the RDNA 4 architecture of the Radeon RX 9000 Series. However, the PS5 Pro does not directly exploit this architecture. It mixes a priori different IPs based on RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 (or even RDNA 4 but only for ray-tracing). It is therefore not possible to port AMD's FSR 4 as is within the Sony ecosystem.
In Mark Cerny's words, he explains that "RDNA 4 and the PS5 Pro hardware use completely separate designs." This is why he talks about "reimplementing" the scaling network used in FSR 4 for the PS5 Pro. At this time, the strategy for achieving this is not detailed. Mark Cerny does, however, hint at the PS5 Pro's 300 TOPS 8-bit capabilities.
Good news for RDNA 3 GPUs?
We'll see what all this means for Sony's console, but also for RDNA 3 GPUs. The development of this "specific" version FSR 4 for non-RDNA 4 hardware could have positive (hopefully) repercussions for RDNA 3 cards.
That said, without going into too much technical detail, AMD's FSR 4 white paper highlights the FP8 acceleration of RDNA 4 GPUs as the main driver of this version. However, the RDNA 3 architecture does not support FP8. Sony will therefore have to adapt FSR 4 to its console hardware; with possibly positive repercussions for older AMD GPUs (provided that the main party concerned wants to indirectly improve its "old" cards).
In any case, don't expect miracles either: a possible hybridization to meet the capabilities of older hardware would certainly lead to a loss of quality compared to the "full" FSR 4 (in the same way that XeSS is more qualitative with Arc GPUs supporting Xe Matrix eXtensions than on other GPUs, for example).
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