Sony’s working on a “reimplementation” of FSR 4 for PS5 Pro – Mark Cerny confirms
“Project Amethyst” will greatly improve future PlayStation 5 Pro games
Last year, AMD and Sony revealed “Project Amethyst“, a collaborative AI effort that will see Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) and AMD work together to create AI software and hardware for gamers. Last week, AMD confirmed that Project Amethyst models were used to develop the company’s FSR 4 upscaler. Now, Sony’s Mark Cerny has confirmed that AMD’s FSR 4 upscaler will be “reimplemented” for PS5 Pro.
Project Amethyst is already bearing fruit for AMD and PlayStation
AMD and Sony have been working together on Project Amethyst for around a year. This collaboration started at the end of PSSR’s development. PSSR is Sony’s AI upscaling solution for PlayStation 5 Pro. Now, Sony is working on implementing a “new neural network” for PlayStation 5 Pro. This network will be “something very similar to FSR 4’s upscaler.”
Currently, Sony plans to release this new upscaler in time for it to be implemented into 2026 PlayStation Pro titles. While this upscaler is likely to be a form of FSR 4, the upscaler will likely be called “PSSR 2” or something similar.
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.
A form of FSR 4 is coming to PS5 Pro
Since the AI hardware in PlayStation 5 Pro and AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture is different, Sony can’t simply bring FSR 4 to PlayStation 5 Pro. However, there is nothing that’s stopping Sony from creating a “reimplementation” of the upscaler on PS5 Pro.
In the future, AMD and Sony will continue to co-develop AI solutions for PC and PlayStation. In the future, this collaboration should also extend to AI hardware. After all, Sony undoubtedly plans to utilise AI with its PlayStation 6 console.
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.
Right now, AMD and Sony are using Project Amethyst to create neural networks for games. In other words, they are working on AI software. In time, they will work on idealised AI hardware, which will benefit future AMD GPUs and PlayStation consoles.
The shorter-term goal is to co-develop neural network architectures and training strategies for game graphics. We’re stronger together than apart, so it makes a lot of sense to combine some of our resources when tackling these problems. And because we began this collaboration in earnest in late 2023 (when PSSR development was wrapping up), I’m happy to say that there have already been results.
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.
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.
Sony and AMD collaborating on the gaming applications of AI just makes sense. There is no reason for both companies to work on these problems separately, especially given the fact that PlayStation 6 will almost undoubtedly use AMD hardware. These efforts will help Sony’s next generation PlayStation be the best console it can be. It should also help AMD catch up to Nvidia when it comes to AI software and AI hardware. That’s great news for gamers, both on PC and on consoles.
You can join the discussion on AMD’s FSR 4 technology potentially coming to PlayStation 5 Pro on the OC3D Forums.
