PlayStation 5 Pro to Gain Full AMD FSR 4 Integration in 2026

[AleksandarK]

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.



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[dir_d]

This is great news for gamers. Now in the near feature every game that is made for PS5 and released simultaneously on Windows should have FSR4. This gives us, the user, more choice and better fidelity in the long run.

 

[LastDudeALive]

I'm very curious how this works "under the hood." According to Sony, the PS5 Pro doesn't include AI hardware from RDNA 3 or RDNA 4. Instead, they tweaked the design of the shader cores, added new instructions, and use the massively increased core count to run the neural networks for PSSR. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1022...e-pssr-neural-network-ai-upscaling/index.html

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.

 

[rv8000]

I'm very curious how this works "under the hood." According to Sony, the PS5 Pro doesn't include AI hardware from RDNA 3 or RDNA 4. Instead, they tweaked the design of the shader cores, added new instructions, and use the massively increased core count to run the neural networks for PSSR. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1022...e-pssr-neural-network-ai-upscaling/index.html

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.

I can imagine sony will be doing the majority of heavy lifting, which also would mean it won’t translate to ports easily, imo.

 

[gffermari]

So PS5 will run the games with FSR3 or PSSR and PS5 Pro with FSR4??

 

[LastDudeALive]

So PS5 will run the games with FSR3 or PSSR and PS5 Pro with FSR4??

No, the base PS5 just has regular RDNA 2 hardware, so it uses FSR or whatever upscaling solution the game developers opt to use. It can't use PSSR. FSR 4 is apparently replacing PSSR on the Playstation 5 Pro.

 

[Daven]

I'm very curious how this works "under the hood." According to Sony, the PS5 Pro doesn't include AI hardware from RDNA 3 or RDNA 4. Instead, they tweaked the design of the shader cores, added new instructions, and use the massively increased core count to run the neural networks for PSSR. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1022...e-pssr-neural-network-ai-upscaling/index.html

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.

This might be one of the reasons behind UDNA.

 

[LastDudeALive]

This might be one of the reasons behind UDNA.

No, UDNA combines their datacenter architecture (CDNA) with their gaming architecture (RDNA), same way Nvidia has just developed one core architecture for both customer bases.

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 mutilated modified to run the PSSR (and apparently now FSR 4) AI models, and proto-RDNA 4 RT cores.

 

[igormp]

I'm very curious how this works "under the hood." According to Sony, the PS5 Pro doesn't include AI hardware from RDNA 3 or RDNA 4. Instead, they tweaked the design of the shader cores, added new instructions, and use the massively increased core count to run the neural networks for PSSR. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1022...e-pssr-neural-network-ai-upscaling/index.html

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.

Same. I'm under impression that it's either using the beefed up RDNA units that the PS5 has, or using that custom "NPU" that Sony claimed to have (not sure if it's an actual NPU or they shoved some extra stuff into the GPU). They do claim to have extra instructions for ML, but I'm not sure where those instructions being used.
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:

The PS5 Pro, RDNA 4 & FSR 4.0

Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 5 Pro rekindled speculation about new gaming tech: a new RDNA-based SoC, a new AI accelerator, and…

medium.com

 

[LastDudeALive]

Same. I'm under impression that it's either using the beefed up RDNA units that the PS5 has, or using that custom "NPU" that Sony claimed to have (not sure if it's an actual NPU or they shoved some extra stuff into the GPU). They do claim to have extra instructions for ML, but I'm not sure where those instructions being used.
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:

The PS5 Pro, RDNA 4 & FSR 4.0

Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 5 Pro rekindled speculation about new gaming tech: a new RDNA-based SoC, a new AI accelerator, and…

medium.com

From the link I posted, there's no separate NPU or Tensor cores at all. Instead they modified the RDNA 2 shaders to do FP8 math, and use the massively increased core count and memory bandwidth of the vector registers as essentially a poor man's NPU.

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.

 

[igormp]

From the link I posted, there's no separate NPU or Tensor cores at all. Instead they modified the RDNA 2 shaders to do FP8 math, and use the massively increased core count and memory bandwidth of the vector registers as essentially a poor man's NPU.

So I guess since FSR4 uses FP8, and the PS5 Pro got modified to do FP8 math, it will work alright.

Yeah, that makes sense.

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.

I guess it depends on how differently Sony implemented their instructions. I'd assume they should be really similar to what AMD already has in their WMMA functions, if so it'd be pretty easy to port the execution over. I don't think it'd be that surprising if in the end Sony just back ported those WMMA instructions over, given that this is exclusive to the PS5 Pro.

 

[RejZoR]

Someone made FSR4 work on regular compute shaders without any Ai. It had the quality of FSR4, but with slightly smaller performance gains compared to FSR4 that has Ai acceleration. Hopefully AMD will do this officially for the sake of larger user base of cards that support FSR4 so game devs have more reasons to bother including it.

 

[Cheeseball]

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.

Most likely AMD does not need to do much, they just need to communicate whatever changes they make with FSR4 to Sony and it will be their team who will implement it into PSSR. As you said, and from that SIE technical video with Mark Cerny, they implemented INT8/FP8 into their RDNA cores, so compatibility should be good since that is what FSR4 uses RDNA 4's AI accelerators for.

Someone made FSR4 work on regular compute shaders without any Ai. It had the quality of FSR4, but with slightly smaller performance gains compared to FSR4 that has Ai acceleration. Hopefully AMD will do this officially for the sake of larger user base of cards that support FSR4 so game devs have more reasons to bother including it.

It was FP8 emulation in FP16, so it used the standard unified shaders in RDNA3 to do the calculations. There was still a noticeable image quality improvement compared to using FSR3 though.

 

[igormp]

Someone made FSR4 work on regular compute shaders without any Ai.

No, they didn't. As said above, it used the regular WMMA stuff, but emulating FP8 on top of FP16 in Linux, hence why the performance hit.

 

[Event Horizon]

Wonder if this will include all the FSR Redstone stuff as well.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

From the link I posted, there's no separate NPU or Tensor cores at all. Instead they modified the RDNA 2 shaders to do FP8 math, and use the massively increased core count and memory bandwidth of the vector registers as essentially a poor man's NPU.

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.

I dunno. Certainly it is more work, but what sort of custom/semi-custom silicon business would they be if they can’t properly support custom hardware designs? Nvidia does the same, where Switch 2 hardware uses an Ampere/Ada hybrid GPU.

 

[LastDudeALive]

I dunno. Certainly it is more work, but what sort of custom/semi-custom silicon business would they be if they can’t properly support custom hardware designs? Nvidia does the same, where Switch 2 hardware uses an Ampere/Ada hybrid GPU.

Here's what I'm trying to say.

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.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Here's what I'm trying to say.

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.

Tegra T239: the heart of the Nintendo Switch 2 from Nvidia - Overclocking.com EN

The Nintendo Switch 2 is said to be equipped with the Tegra T239 chip, which is a huge step up from the Tegra X1 found in the first Switch.

en.overclocking.com

 

[LastDudeALive]

Tegra T239: the heart of the Nintendo Switch 2 from Nvidia - Overclocking.com EN

The Nintendo Switch 2 is said to be equipped with the Tegra T239 chip, which is a huge step up from the Tegra X1 found in the first Switch.

en.overclocking.com

That says absolutely nothing about what elements of Ada are in it?

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

That says absolutely nothing about what elements of Ada are in it?

From another article, it is said that the power saving features of Ada were backported. Certainly suggests to us that the Switch 2 SOC was developed around the same time as Ada.

Inside Nvidia's new hardware for Switch 2: what is the T239 processor?

What new hardware has Nvidia cooked up for Nintendo? Digital Foundry puts together all available info on the cutting-edge T239 processor.

www.eurogamer.net

 

[Alpha_Lyrae]

I'm very curious how this works "under the hood." According to Sony, the PS5 Pro doesn't include AI hardware from RDNA 3 or RDNA 4. Instead, they tweaked the design of the shader cores, added new instructions, and use the massively increased core count to run the neural networks for PSSR. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1022...e-pssr-neural-network-ai-upscaling/index.html

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.

PS5 Pro is technically an RDNA3 design with RDNA4 RT engines, so it has matrix FP16/INT8/INT4 instructions. The shader ISA, however, remains on RDNA2 (gfx10) to prevent work doubling between PS5 and PS5 Pro. So, no dual-issue FP32 support.
- 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.

 

[Visible Noise]

Kinda stings that AMD fans have to drop $$$ on a 2025 model video card just to keep pace with a 2024 PlayStation that was designed years ago.

 

[wolf]

AMD - today's features and performance, tomorrow.

 

[ixi]

Good for le gamers . Xbox gonna support it too. Valve console alreasy usea fsr, not the latest, but soon (1-2y) there will be next steam device which should support fsr4 too. Good times.

 

[RejZoR]

AMD - today's features and performance, tomorrow.

Well, they dropped FSR4 almost out of nowhere and it's a thing TODAY.