Anyone fortunate enough to have acquired one of AMD’s latest GPUs at the recent launch is probably delighted by the new RDNA 4 architecture of the Radeon RX 9070 XT. The new RX 9070-series cards sold out within minutes, partly due to accessible pricing and positive reviews. This success is credited to the new machine learning-powered upscaler in FSR 4, developed alongside the Japanese tech giant, Sony, as part of the Project Amethyst initiative.
Eurogamer recently discussed FSR 4’s development and its implications for future PlayStation consoles with Sony’s Mark Cerny. The exciting part is that gamers need not wait for the PS6; Sony aims to implement a version of the machine learning technology on the PS5 Pro by 2026.
“Our focus for 2025 is collaborating with developers to integrate PSSR into their games; concurrently, we have already begun implementing the new neural network on PS5 Pro,” says Cerny.
Cerny highlighted that their target was to implement something similar to FSR 4’s upscaler on PS5 Pro for games releasing in 2026, stating that the system should take the same inputs and yield nearly the same outputs. However, he noted that this undertaking is ambitious and time-consuming, explaining why this new upscaler hasn’t been seen on the PS5 Pro yet.
Differences in power and design between the PS5 Pro and the new RX 9070 cards mean that the next iteration for PSSR will differ from FSR 4. Certain machine learning techniques that enhance processing speed, such as sparsity, might not be supported, though Cerny believes FSR 4 can be adapted for the PS5 Pro.
“That is our goal, and we are confident in our ability to achieve it,” he asserts. “The peak performance for PS5 Pro stands at 300 8-bit TOPS without sparsity, aligning well with the recently launched AMD GPUs. We do not believe sparsity contributes significantly to this upscaling algorithm.”
The Amethyst project will continue to evolve, possibly leading to more integrations between Sony and AMD hardware. Cerny also outlined plans to further develop machine learning technologies to enhance graphics in games, enhancing hardware architecture to empower this technology, showing an optimistic future for both PC and console gamers.
