Last week, AMD released its new wave of graphics hardware, developed around the new RDNA 4 architecture. Machine learning performance is dramatically increased, opening the door to FSR 4 – a brand-new ML-based upscaler that delivers excellent quality, comparable to Nvidia’s DLSS. Just after launch, AMD revealed that it was co-developed in association with Sony as part of its Project Amethyst initiative and in an interview with Digital Foundry, PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny says that “our target is to have something very similar to FSR 4’s upscaler available on PS5 Pro for 2026 titles as the next evolution of PSSR.”
“The neural network (and training recipe) in FSR 4’s upscaler are the first results of the Amethyst collaboration,” Cerny told us. “And results are excellent, it’s a more advanced approach that can exceed the crispness of PSSR. I’m very proud of the work of the joint team!”
You can assess the quality of FSR 4 yourself via the embedded video below, where Digital Foundry stacks up the new upscaler against the non-ML FSR 3.1, along with DLSS 3.7 and DLSS 4.0. While we have more in-depth coverage to come, our take on the new technology is that it represents a huge leap over FSR 3.1, delivering quality wins over DLSS 3.7. While there are elements where the new transformer-based DLSS 4 model wins out, we were delighted to see that FSR 4 is surprisingly competitive against Nvidia’s latest.
However, it is going to take some time to see the new technology migrate across to PlayStation 5 Pro. “Our focus for 2025 is working with developers to integrate PSSR into their titles; in parallel, though, we have already started to implement the new neural network on PS5 Pro. Our target is to have something very similar to FSR 4’s upscaler available on PS5 Pro for 2026 titles as the next evolution of PSSR; it should take the same inputs and produce essentially the same outputs. Doing that implementation is rather ambitious and time consuming, which is why you haven’t already seen this new upscaler on PS5 Pro.”
The raw hardware specifications of the new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are considerably higher than PS5 Pro – we are talking about higher mid-range hardware here in a market that encompasses anything from $200 to $2000 GPUs. Meanwhile, our tests did suggest that FSR 4 does have a significant computational cost, but even so, Cerny believes that PS5 Pro’s ML hardware is up to the task of running FSR 4 without significant re-architecting.