Digital Foundry clocks QSSR at 1.5-1.8 ms per frame in Wolverine
Sony's AI upscaler for the standard PS5 sharpens the image, especially in Wolverine, but costs frame time. In Ghost of Yōtei it barely registers.
Digital Foundry has measured what QSSR costs, the AI upscaler Sony brought to the standard PS5, and the image gain is not free. In Marvel's Wolverine, going from 864p to 1440p with QSSR takes 1.5 to 1.8 ms more per frame than Insomniac Games' own upscaler, according to the analysis as summarized by heise online.
At 2160p output, the extra cost rises to 4.4 milliseconds. With the frame rate uncapped in performance mode, the difference works out to 8 to 10 frames per second.
Ghost of Yōtei fares differently. QSSR ran almost as fast as the game's previous FSR 3 implementation in that same mode.
Why it costs
The cause is hardware. The PS5 Pro has dedicated machine-learning units (300 TOPS) and supports INT8 instructions. The standard console has neither, so QSSR does most of its math in FP16. For reference, PSSR, the Pro's upscaler, spends about 2 ms to reach 4K.
What the image gained
Digital Foundry describes a considerably more stable and detailed picture with fewer artifacts, especially in foliage. TechRadar reports the jump is "exceptional" in Wolverine and less dramatic in Ghost of Yōtei, which already looked good.
Sony introduced QSSR on Oct. 1 and will open it to all PlayStation studios, per the announcement we already covered. Digital Foundry cautions that each studio has to tune it game by game: in titles that already use PSSR, the work takes a few days.
Sony gave no list of games or dates for further implementations. The figures here are Digital Foundry's measurements, not official Sony data, and this outlet did not review the original video.
