PS5 Pro owners will soon get an improved PSSR AI upscaler, while PC gamers with RDNA 2 and 3 GPUs are still praying for AMD to add official support for FSR 4

You might not be fully aware of this, but PC gamers with RDNA-based GPUs in their graphics cards share quite a lot in common with anyone who has a PlayStation 5 or PS5 Pro. That’s because there are quite a few architectural features common to both. However, while only RDNA 4 users officially get FSR 4, PS5 Pro gamers will soon be getting an updated version of Sony’s PSSR upscaler, with Resident Evil Requiem being the first game to use it.

If your reaction to this is ‘so what?’, it’s worth bearing in mind that FSR 4 and PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) stem from Project Amethyst, a joint venture between AMD and Sony for bringing AI-powered upscaling to consoles and PCs alike.

Now, it is important to note that FSR 4 and PSSR aren’t the same thing. I’m sure there are some similarities between the fundamental algorithms in both, but AMD’s upscaler is designed to be used on GPUs that sport a huge L3 cache, along with a copious amount of VRAM and bandwidth. PSSR, on the other hand, has to run on what’s essentially an integrated GPU, albeit a very beefy one, that doesn’t have any L3 cache and a shared memory pool.

More importantly, RDNA 4 GPUs have dedicated units for processing the matrix instructions used in the AI parts of FSR 4, whereas the PS5 Pro doesn’t. It runs all the calculations via the ’normal’ compute units.

Anyway, the point I’ve wandered away from here is that despite modders getting FSR 4 to run on RDNA 2 GPUs, AMD still hasn’t offered any official support for older architectures. Even though it clearly works on such graphics chips.

(Image credit: AMD)

Sure, you don’t get as big a performance boost as you would using an equivalent Radeon RX 9000-series card, but if ‘FSR 4’ can be made to work on a PS5 Pro as well, which has RDNA 2-type compute units, then surely there’s no reason for it not be properly supported on RX 6000 or 7000-series graphics cards.

From a business perspective, there is one very good reason, of course: FSR 4 helps sell RX 9060 and 9070 cards. And given AMD’s relative share of the discrete GPU market, every little advantage to shift a few more boxes is always going to be taken. And to continue being fair to AMD, it’s not like the standard PS5 supports PSSR, because it doesn’t.

I suspect by now that AMD isn’t going update FSR 4 to add official support for pre-RDNA 4 GPUs, so while PS5 Pro gamers will soon get to enjoy Resident Evil Requiem with a touch nicer graphics, Team Red fans on PC will have to make do with good old FSR 3.1. Fortunately for them, it’s actually very well implemented in the game, especially the frame generation part of the tech package.

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