The PlayStation 5 Pro has always been a machine for hardcore graphical enthusiasts, with a hefty $700 price tag and proprietary upscaling technology called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). PlayStation is now doubling down on that market by making the PS5 Pro even more of a technological powerhouse by implementing something more like AMD’s recent FSR 4 technology in 2026.
The news comes from tech site Digital Foundry’s interview with PlayStation technology guru and lead system architect Mark Cerny, who confirmed that PSSR will be evolving into a new form that more closely resembles FSR 4 next year as part of the Amethyst collaboration between Sony and AMD.
“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,” Cerny says.
The foundations of FSR, which uses machine learning to instantly upscale images bypassing any hardware performance and upscaling a 720p image to 4K and is a hybrid of CNN and transformer models, were birthed from the collaborative efforts of Sony and AMD and the PS5 Pro was seemingly built with this upgrade in mind. It may take a little while for games to take advantage of this specific implementation, though.
While PlayStation is still in the implementation phase for FSR 4, they are still encouraging developers to use PSSR on the PS5 Pro. While this will likely see some use in the near future on currently available hardware, it is not difficult to see that Sony is looking toward the future and the next generation of consoles with these steps. Implementation using the PlayStation 5 is still keeping one foot firmly grounded while they dip their toes in with further collaborating.
For a theoretical PlayStation 6, we might even see something that’s not similar to FSR 4, but actual implementation of FSR 4. Or perhaps even a PSSR 2 that leapfrogs it entirely.
