The QSSR announcement was a welcome surprise, and it will definitely extend the life of Sony’s current-gen gaming box. Much like PS5 Pro’s PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), QSSR stands for Quick Spectral Super Resolution, which is essentially a fancy name for a proprietary upscaling tech. What was even more surprising than the announcement was the subsequent release of the tech as a system update.
Unlike PSSR, QSSR is targeted specifically towards the base PS5 hardware, which up until this point relied on checkerboard rendering and FSR tech for upscaling.
While QSSR certainly is impressive, especially when contrasted against FSR and DLSS, it does have a glaring issue: limited support across games.
QSSR looks great and solves my biggest gripe with PS5’s default renderer
It even holds its own against Nvidia’s DLSS
The PS5, despite its age, is a fairly competent gaming box, especially for its price. However, if there’s one thing that I never really liked about the system, it has to be the poor anti-aliasing. In past PlayStation systems, Sony relied on the traditional checkerboard rendering. While that technique helps increase the output resolution without degrading the base image quality, it also introduces issues like artifacting and a ton of aliasing across the edges.
On PS5, however, Sony instead decided to move to AMD’s FSR and later, FSR2 for most of its upscaling solutions. While FSR is an upgrade over checkerboard rendering, it still doesn’t solve the aliasing and ghosting issues with the output image.
With QSSR, Sony aims to fully address that issue. And from my initial testing of the tech, it seems to do an excellent job of not only upscaling but also improving the image quality over the FSR2 output. That said, QSSR is certainly not as impressive as PSSR, which works incredibly well even when upscaling to 4K.
However, it does look a lot sharper compared to the default upscalers used in both Ghost of Yōtei and Marvel’s Wolverine. In fact, to my eyes, QSSR looks even crisper than DLSS set to the Balanced preset at 1440p.
QSSR isn’t as performant as DLSS, but it certainly looks a lot better.
I couldn’t test the same games on my PC and PS5 since neither Ghost of Yōtei nor Marvel’s Wolverine is available on the former. However, I did test out games that use the same engine as these two titles and are available on PC: Ghost of Tsushima and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
From my initial testing, I found that the image quality is way better on PS5, with less obvious shimmering and upscaling artifacts. This surprised me, since the only reason I never really enjoyed playing games on my PS5 was the poor upscaling tech.
Although QSSR isn’t as performant as DLSS (at the same target resolution), it looks much sharper and very close to native 1440p. And this is just the initial rollout of the QSSR update. With future system updates and improvements, I can totally see the tech offering way better image quality, and at perhaps less of a performance cost.
The biggest issue with QSSR is its availability, or lack thereof
The two games supported by QSSR didn’t even need it in the first place
Currently, QSSR only supports two PlayStation-published titles: Ghost of Yōtei and Marvel’s Wolverine. It’s actually quite surprising considering neither of these games had an image quality or performance-related issue that needed a dedicated upscaler. Despite its many rough edges, Marvel’s Wolverine is still a looker with excellent image stability and a rather smooth performance mode. The same goes for Ghost of Yōtei. Instead, Sony could’ve released QSSR for games that really needed it.
Games like Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Elden Ring, Black Myth Wukong, Silent Hill 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds suffer from poor FSR2 implementation. These titles could’ve greatly benefited from Sony’s temporal upscaler.
Additionally, I would’ve loved to see a better upscaler for backward-compatible games on PS5, such as Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, The Last of Us Remastered, Infamous: Second Son, and, well, Bloodborne. Alas, all I can do now is wait until developers start implementing QSSR in their games going forward.
QSSR is what DLSS 5 should have been
As I was testing out the improvements brought to games like Ghost of Yotei using QSSR, I was constantly thinking about how it does precisely what DLSS 5 should prioritize. QSSR essentially uses AMD and PlayStation’s proprietary neural rendering architecture to improve image quality and stability. However, instead of going all out on trying to “enhance” the lighting engine, QSSR simply focuses on stabilizing the upscaled output image.
It’s essentially using PS5’s neural rendering capabilities to deliver a better output image without drastically affecting performance. Sure, it has some quirks, such as somewhat shoddy performance when used in Quality Mode.
However, it certainly is a step in the right direction toward fixing one of the most glaring issues on the PS5. With DLSS 5, Nvidia is more interested in changing how a game originally looked, instead of trying to squeeze more performance out of their own hardware. Hopefully, this is something Nvidia will eventually look into, close to DLSS 5’s official launch.