Sony’s PlayStation 5 QSSR May Lack the Shortcut That Made PSSR Easy, As Older Games Could Need a Later SDK

Last week, Sony revealed the Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR) upscaler for PlayStation 5, an AI-driven image upscaling technology not dissimilar to the PlayStation 5 Pro‘s PSSR upscaler that can be used on the base system to bridge the image quality gap with the mid-generation refresh. According to Daniel Craig, Principal Engineer for Graphics R&D at SIE, retrofits will be easy and require only a bit of tuning, but there could be development challenges that significantly limit how many older games will support the new upscaler.

“One thing we need to keep in mind is the status of QSSR within the SDK framework on the Sony development platform,”Digital Foundry‘s Richard Leadbetter said in a recent Q&A video shared on YouTube. “Is it available for older versions of the SDK? And if not, then that does present problems for retrofits, right? Because the developer would need to update their older games to run on the later SDK.”

“I did hear over the weekend that might be a bit of a challenge for older titles,” he continued. This wasn’t the case for PSSR, as it was possible to add the upscaler to games running on older SDKs, making it much easier and potentially more cost-effective for developers. For this reason, a centralized toggle is also not possible, as there is no sort of centralized library as there was with PSSR that enabled it.

If an SDK update would be required to retrofit older PlayStation 5 games with the QSSR upscaler, I can honestly see only the biggest games getting support. While doing this update may sound easy to the uninitiated, it is a demanding process that requires weeks of porting work and quality assurance, which may not be worth it for a single-player game that has been released, say, three to four years ago, and that is not enjoying particularly long legs on the market.

Even if QSSR will not be retrofitted in many games, there’s no denying that it is an exciting development for the base PlayStation 5, as too many games launch with average image quality, which upscalers like AMD FSR can’t always clean up at higher output resolutions like 1440p and 4K. In addition, with what many believe will be the longest cross-generation period of all time, QSSR will ensure that games also targeting the PlayStation 6 will not leave too much to be desired in terms of visual quality on the base system.

About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack.

After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi “Suda51” Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA’s president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3.

When he’s not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.

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