Wednesday, July 2nd 2025

PlayStation 5 Pro to Gain Full AMD FSR 4 Integration in 2026
Sony has announced that the PlayStation 5 Pro will receive the full version of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 upscaling technology in 2026. This upgrade delivers the exact same engine that PC users have accessed since its March release, replacing the current PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) system without any reduction in functionality. Coming from Project Amethyst, the update is a collaborative effort between Sony and AMD, launched alongside the PS5 Pro's late 2024 debut. In a recent interview, PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny confirmed that the jointly developed algorithm will be implemented on the console exactly as it appears on PC. They are providing the full feature set of FSR 4 to PS5 Pro owners, without any trimmings.
AMD introduced Sony to its comprehensive quality‑assurance practices and helped establish a dedicated QA team focused solely on upscaling performance. Participants from both companies credit this reciprocal exchange with accelerating development, achieving significant milestones in under nine months. Sony plans to distribute the FSR 4 upgrade as a free system update to all PS5 Pro users. Meanwhile, AMD will integrate lessons learned from Project Amethyst into its next RDNA 5/UDNA graphics architecture. Because neither company placed usage restrictions on the shared research, third‑party developers and hardware partners can also adopt these advancements. For PS5 Pro owners, the upgrade will provide a noticeable improvement in image clarity without compromising performance. For next-generation RDNA 5/UDNA GPUs, upscaling optimizations will be even more fine-tuned, as developers have already done the same work for the console.
Source:
Tom's Guide
AMD introduced Sony to its comprehensive quality‑assurance practices and helped establish a dedicated QA team focused solely on upscaling performance. Participants from both companies credit this reciprocal exchange with accelerating development, achieving significant milestones in under nine months. Sony plans to distribute the FSR 4 upgrade as a free system update to all PS5 Pro users. Meanwhile, AMD will integrate lessons learned from Project Amethyst into its next RDNA 5/UDNA graphics architecture. Because neither company placed usage restrictions on the shared research, third‑party developers and hardware partners can also adopt these advancements. For PS5 Pro owners, the upgrade will provide a noticeable improvement in image clarity without compromising performance. For next-generation RDNA 5/UDNA GPUs, upscaling optimizations will be even more fine-tuned, as developers have already done the same work for the console.
40 Comments on PlayStation 5 Pro to Gain Full AMD FSR 4 Integration in 2026
So is AMD going to have to maintain two branches of FSR 4, one that runs on the Tensor cores in RDNA 4 and one that runs on the modified shader cores for the PS5 Pro, while maintaining 100% compatibility? That seems like a lot of work.
The issue with the PS5 and PS5 Pro is that it's not "off the shelf" hardware, AMD heavily customized both chips. The PS5 Pro, for instance, is a franken-chip amalgamation of RDNA 2 shaders
mutilatedmodified to run the PSSR (and apparently now FSR 4) AI models, and proto-RDNA 4 RT cores.Sony does claim that the PS5 can do 300 TOPs INT8/FP8, and given that FSR4 uses FP8, AMD and Sony may have just made it run on top of that NPU-like thing instead of on the GPU itself.
This link has some nice discussion points on that topic:
medium.com/@opinali/the-ps5-pro-rdna-4-fsr-4-0-d1bff4bcdca3
So I guess since FSR4 uses FP8, and the PS5 Pro got modified to do FP8 math, it will work alright.
My concern is more that now AMD has to maintain FSR 4 for two entirely different architectures; RDNA 4 with dedicated tensor cores and the PS5 Pro with modified compute shaders. Even if they both use FP8 math, I'd imagine the implementation is going to be extremely different. Especially since the goal seems to be a game dev just has to implement FSR 4 in their game, and it will work "out of the box" on both PS5 Pro and PC.
This just seems to be one more example of how desperate AMD is for the console business, which is now far more important than their discrete GPU business. They need Sony so much that they're willing to take over responsibility for one of the PS5 Pro's main features. Masterclass by Sony, tbh. Now instead of having to pay programmers to maintain your forked PSSR, AMD does all the work.
On one hand, AMD is trying to catch up to Nvidia, who's success is in no small part due to the fact that they have a unified development model, exemplified by CUDA. You write CUDA code, and it will work anywhere. The architecture for their consumer and enterprise clients is the same. AMD is explicitly attempting to copy this with the upcoming unification of their enterprise CDNA architecture and consumer RDNA architecture into UDNA, one architecture for all clients.
On the other hand, AMD's weak position in the industry is compromising this goal. FSR 4 was originally intended to be the RDNA 4 exclusive DLSS competitor. They didn't even extend it to RDNA 3 which has FP16 capability, while Nvidia extended the transformer model to Turing and Ampere which only have FP16. Obviously, AMD doesn't have the resources (or doesn't want to spend the resources) supporting these older architectures. But because AMD is dependent on Sony for their gaming revenue, Sony can pressure AMD to take over responsibility for one of the PS5 Pro's core features, AI upscaling. Instead of Sony creating and maintaining PSSR, AMD now has to maintain two separate versions of FSR 4 for completely different architectures and maintain 100% compatibility and ease of use.
There's not anything inherently wrong with creating custom chip designs or putting FSR 4 on the PS5 Pro. It just seems to contradict AMD's stated goals and shows their weaker position in the industry.
Also, it's not relevant to this topic, but where did you see the Switch 2 is a Ampere/Ada hybrid? Everything I've seen indicates it's just a slightly modified Tegra unit fabricated on Samsung 8nm. It's far more off-the-shelf than the custom Xbox or PS5 chips.
www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-inside-nvidias-latest-hardware-for-nintendo-what-is-the-t239-processor
- The "AI cores" in RDNA3 aren't actually cores. They're instructions that execute in the CUs (sound familiar?). 2 AI ops can be issued per CU, one per SIMD32; RDNA has 2xSIMD32s per CU. So, 60 CUs = 120 "AI cores"
Thus, to access the matrix instructions in PS5 Pro, a separate SDK is used, in this case, PSSR. Devs also have to do a little coding to optimize for the new RDNA4 RT engines in PS5 Pro as well.
So, there are a couple of ways FSR4 can be ported, and in PS5 Pro, emulating FP8 through matrix FP16 is a possibility (or using 8-bit integers for most data, then FP16). PSSR 1.0 is heavy on INT8, and that can continue in PSSR 2.0/FSR4 along with emulated FP8 for the parts of the algorithm that require it.
PS5 Pro does not support FP8 natively.