Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

I don't understand PSSR even more now. If you're gonna do a refresh and your technical partner is working on a solid solution (FSR4) why not leverage that and adjust the hardware accordingly.

Instead you launch probably one of the most mediocre mid gen upgrades in memory and push the true next gen out even further.
 
I don't understand PSSR even more now. If you're gonna do a refresh and your technical partner is working on a solid solution (FSR4) why not leverage that and adjust the hardware accordingly.

Instead you launch probably one of the most mediocre mid gen upgrades in memory and push the true next gen out even further.
Because there's no guarantee that AMD will maintain binary compatibility with their current implementation of FSR4. AMD might even replace their entire upscaling technology at the driver level later on to better suit future hardware designs ...

Consoles have a hard requirement that their graphics code/libraries be statically linked to the game's binaries. PSSR is likely more deeply integrated (PSSR kernel itself which contains all of the models/weights/code) in a game's graphics stack than FSR4 (I'd assume it's a driver-side black box) is ...

PSSR and FSR4 have nothing in common with their implementations aside from their concept that they're AI upscalers. Sony listed their AI hardware as "custom RDNA" over "future RDNA" for a reason and it's also why we don't see any AMDGPU backend LLVM patches for 3x3 convolution shader instructions ...
 
I don't understand PSSR even more now. If you're gonna do a refresh and your technical partner is working on a solid solution (FSR4) why not leverage that and adjust the hardware accordingly.

Instead you launch probably one of the most mediocre mid gen upgrades in memory and push the true next gen out even further.
PSSR is probably very close to FSR4 in actual code, but seeing framerates on the 9700xt tells me that FSR4 would be too heavy for PS5 Pro. PSSR could maybe be a lighter version of the same upscaler, with some implementation optimizations for the hardware.
 
I don't understand PSSR even more now. If you're gonna do a refresh and your technical partner is working on a solid solution (FSR4) why not leverage that and adjust the hardware accordingly.

Instead you launch probably one of the most mediocre mid gen upgrades in memory and push the true next gen out even further.

Sony needed a solution to be ready at least 3 months before the PS5 Pro launched, so that it could be incorporated into launch games. This was probably something that was discussed even earlier than FSR 4.
I assume that FSR 4 was only ready in January of this year.

Another point is the requirement for more TOPS in machine learning hardware. For the PS5 Pro to have something like this, Sony would have to increase the silicon space for this, increasing costs.
 
Sony needed a solution to be ready at least 3 months before the PS5 Pro launched, so that it could be incorporated into launch games. This was probably something that was discussed even earlier than FSR 4.
I assume that FSR 4 was only ready in January of this year.
Why was PS5Pro forced to release when it did, though? They could have waited. Microsoft has already announced that they weren't doing a mid gen refresh, and delaying 5Pro's launch would really only benefit developers who were adding upscaling to their games.
 
PSSR seems like a questionable use of resources at this time. Maybe the details tell a different story but it looks like they are stuck having to maintain an inferior proprietary upscaler going forward.
 
@Dictator Any reason why DLSS4 is so heavy in Rift Apart? You did a previous video and summarized the cost of the Transformer model and it's not that high. DLSS4 taking the game from 130 fps to 105 fps doesn't seem normal.
I am not exactly sure! Rich did the 5070 Ti performance recordings for me as I do not have a 5070 Ti, only an RX 9070 XT. He was a bit surprised too, but the numbers are there. I cannot double check on my end.

The only thing I can say is that Ratchet and Clank is pretty bad on Nvidia GPUs in general due to Direct Storage GPU Decompression. Something I hope to cover in a later video at some point. The only issue is the few implementations of GPU Decompression we have seen are from Nixxes only. And to make generalisable statements, I would need a bit more than just their implementations as they could be doing funky stuff other devs might not do.
 
PSSR is probably very close to FSR4 in actual code,...
Given Sony and AMD's collaboration in this space, announced as Amethyst in December, that work would have been started long before the formal joint-venture announcement. It seems a certainty that PSSR has at least informed FSSR4.
 
the 9070, without the XT, is a really good GPU for my taste, a decent power consumption and better than the 5070, except for RT maybe, but not bad in that regard either.
Given Sony and AMD's collaboration in this space, announced as Amethyst in December, that work would have been started long before the formal joint-venture announcement. It seems a certainty that PSSR has at least informed FSSR4.
hope they come with something interesting this time around, this generation of consoles don't make people feel green with envy. Wish they bring some new life to the console space 'cos AMD is improving and Sony is most probably aware of the fact that the PS5 appeared halfway during the switch to the RT revolution and new AI techs, it doesn't do great at any of those, plus probably the most interesting part of the hardware is probably the use of the gamepad.
 
the power consumption of the 9070XT compared to the 5070Ti isn't very compelling. In that sense, the 9070 beats the RTX 5070 in performance with a very similar power consumption, but the 9070XT isn't as interesting imho. For someone like me with a 550W PSU it'd make no sense to have a 9070.

This is the power consumption of the 9070 XT on a full loaded PC.

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Why was PS5Pro forced to release when it did, though? They could have waited. Microsoft has already announced that they weren't doing a mid gen refresh, and delaying 5Pro's launch would really only benefit developers who were adding upscaling to their games.

Sony's CEO said in an interview that the PS5 Pro was planned even before the launch of the PS5, due to the satisfactory results of the PS4 Pro. Assuming that the PS6 also has its plans, the release dates were obviously thought, in the case of the PS5 Pro, to be something in the middle of the generation, so as not to interfere with the launch of the PS6. And November is the month that sells the most consoles.
 
On the PSSR front for the sake of argument... how many examples of FSR4 have we seen so far? I must admit that seeing it in the same games that we saw PSSR look relatively better in (Ratchet, Horizon, etc) makes me a bit nervous. It's clear why those games were used to do a bunch of the training on PS5 but also clear that it didn't necessarily generalize super well to other workloads at least initially. On PC there's a far greater swath of games and I would hope that the training was much broader across more of them, but I admit that seeing those same workloads as the initial examples of it does leave a lot of questions in my mind.

Hopefully it's all fine and FSR4 is much more general than PSSR, but I'm not yet willing to jump to that conclusion based on the workloads shown. I do expect both will evolve over time to cover the majority of use cases well though as I see no fundamental reason why they wouldn't.
 
I don't understand PSSR even more now. If you're gonna do a refresh and your technical partner is working on a solid solution (FSR4) why not leverage that and adjust the hardware accordingly.

Instead you launch probably one of the most mediocre mid gen upgrades in memory and push the true next gen out even further.
Generally I also dont get it but question is how would fsr4 perform on 300tops pro
 
I wonder what's the real AI performance of RDNA 4 compared to PS5 Pro RDNA 2.x. The 9070xt has 1500 tops, but how are those calculated? That's worlds apart from PS5 pro 300.
 
Sony needed a solution to be ready at least 3 months before the PS5 Pro launched, so that it could be incorporated into launch games. This was probably something that was discussed even earlier than FSR 4.
I assume that FSR 4 was only ready in January of this year.

Another point is the requirement for more TOPS in machine learning hardware. For the PS5 Pro to have something like this, Sony would have to increase the silicon space for this, increasing costs.

 
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