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.
“That is what we are targeting, and we believe we can achieve it,” he says. “The peak performance number for PS5 Pro is 300 8-bit TOPS without sparsity, which compares very well to the recently released AMD GPUs. We don’t believe sparsity is useful for this particular upscaling algorithm.”
Sparsity is a feature of ML hardware not supported in Pro, but is supported in RDNA 4. It refers to a technique where a significant portion of the data or computations in a neural network are intentionally reduced or skipped to improve efficiency. Our understanding is that Nvidia used sparsity to increase DLSS performance in the RTX 30-series ‘Ampere’ generation.
“RDNA 4 and the hardware in PS5 Pro are completely separate designs, which is why I speak in terms of ‘reimplementation’ on PS5 Pro when I talk about the new upscaling network used in FSR 4. I’m definitely looking forward to a future with co-developed hardware features for machine learning that will dramatically increase the interoperability.”
Based on prior interviews, the Amethyst project is understood to be an extensive venture – one that looks set to extend beyond the lifespan of PS5 Pro, presumably into the next generation console era. It looks like we should expect more convergence in design, as opposed to the Pro’s custom ML solution, designed by Sony itself.
“There are really two goals, one shorter term and one longer term,” explains Cerny. “The shorter-term goal is to co-develop neural network architectures and training strategies for game graphics. We’re stronger together than apart, so it makes a lot of sense to combine some of our resources when tackling these problems. And because we began this collaboration in earnest in late 2023 (when PSSR development was wrapping up), I’m happy to say that there have already been results.
“The longer-term goal is to work together to create a more ideal hardware architecture for machine learning, something capable of processing the neural networks needed for game graphics at high speed. PS5 Pro was a wonderful learning experience for us here at SIE, and of course AMD has an incredible amount of knowledge from its multi-generation RDNA roadmap. Again, it just makes sense to combine those expertises.
“Now to be clear, this technology has uses beyond PlayStation, and it’s about supporting broad work in machine learning across a variety of devices – the biggest win is when developers can freely move their code from device to device.”
Traditionally, AMD’s GPUOpen has been the initiative by which the company has shared its innovations and it’ll be interesting to see how this approach transitions into the era of machine learning and the extent to which we’ll see FSR 4 and its successors migrate to other devices. AMD’s Jack Huynh has already talked about FSR 4 and frame generation being used to dramatically increase battery life on mobile devices, for example. But for Sony, Project Amethyst is all about working with AMD on common goals, while at the same time acknowledging that each party may have different uses for and different variants of the technologies created.
“FSR 4 and this next evolution of PSSR are a paradigm for our future, going forward we expect to have our own implementations of each of the algorithms developed through the collaboration,” says Cerny. “And there may be slight tweaks to them in our world, as technical targets for console game development and PC game development tend to be slightly different. For example – as I said in the PS5 Pro technical video in December – 60 frames per second gaming is very important in the console world, but the PC world doesn’t quite think about frame-rate the same way.”
And it looks like PS5 Pro’s key enhancements – ML and ray tracing – may also be a focus for Amethyst. With the RDNA 4 reveal, AMD showcased a toyshop demo using a range of techniques – path tracing backed by neural rendering technologies, including a denoising feature that seems to represent AMD’s take on Nvidia’s ray reconstruction. At the basic level, think of this as an upscaler for RT. Is this a part of Amethyst?
“All I can say is stay tuned! There’s a lot of opportunity with our Amethyst collaboration, and we know that ray tracing is a huge part of the graphics future.”
