PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling for the Pro-Exclusive Graphics Mode: A Report on Sony’s Plans for PS5 Pro

Sources familiar with Sony’s plans tell The Verge that Sony is asking developers to create a new PS5 Pro-exclusive graphics mode in games that combines Sony’s new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling to 4K resolution with a 60fps frame rate and ray-tracing effects. Insider Gaming first reported on these Enhanced PS5 Pro game details last month.

The standard mode works the same as a regular PS5 with a certain amount of power allocated to the cpu and a power budget that allows for lower frequencies. Sony says that the lower frequencies are rare, and that unused power on the compute side is going to the computer graphics card.

There is an increase in memory speed and allocations which may be useful for Sony’s new support for the PSS. This is essentially Sony’s upscaling answer to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR to improve frame rates and image quality on PlayStation. Sony has built a “custom architecture for machine learning” on the PS5 Pro, which supports 300TOPS of 8-bit computation.

Simply running a game on PS5 Pro with a more stable frame rate isn’t enough for the Enhanced label. Sony also won’t add the label to games that run with a variable resolution and see increased resolution on the PS5 Pro that doesn’t improve the maximum resolution. So if a game moves from 1440p–2160p variable to 1800p–2160p variable, this will not qualify for the Enhanced label.

Sony does warn developers that many unpatched games won’t show improvements in this ultra-boost mode, though. There isn’t any improvement in games that run at fixed resolution and graphical settings. Even if developers remain on older versions of Sony’s SDK, they can still utilize PSSR to upscale titles and get access to the additional system memory that Sony is offering game developers.

The requirements for the PS5 Pro Enhanced label seem largely similar to what Sony did with the PS4 Pro, and there’s some clear flexibility here so developers can pick what they want to improve. If a game qualifies for the Enhanced label, it can be displayed on disc packaging and on Sony’s PlayStation Store pages.