The lead architect behind the PS5, Mark Cerny, has revealed that Sony’s partnership with AMD is resulting in a development that can act as a direct upgrade for the PS5 Pro. Speaking to Tom’s Guide, Cerny has said that the upgrade “is a drop-in replacement for the current PSSR”, which would also indicate that the next version of FSR through Project Amethyst will be a major upgrade over Sony’s own proprietary upscaling technology.
Cerny has also said that, since it is a drop-in replacement, it won’t be too difficult for developers to start using the new technology over PSSR for even bigger improvements in visuals even if the game is being rendered at a lower resolution. Cerny also noted that the new technology is not proprietary, and that it will help the whole industry move forward.
“This is not for proprietary technology,” said Cerny. “This is really trying to move the industry forward. Obviously we want to use these technologies on our consoles, but these technologies are available to any of AMD’s customers freely.”
AMD exec Jack Huynh was also part of the interview, and spoke about how Sony’s involvement with Project Amethyst has been good for the company overall. “Mark makes us a better company,” he said. “We push each other.”
With part of Project Amethyst revolving around Sony giving AMD training data so that it could train its AI-based upscaler – part of FSR 4 – on more real-world data and games, the company had also apparently pushed Sony create its own QA team to vet new iterations of upscaling algorithms. “This was news to us,” said Cerny. “We did not have this at SIE; it really hadn’t occurred to us. And it turns out to be vital.”
Ultimately, it looks like the partnership has been paying off far quicker than Cerny had originally thought it would. He believed that Project Amethyst would start paying off after a few years’ worth of training for the AI models. However, new algorithms were developed as part of the partnership in less than a year.
“The algorithm they came up with could be implemented on current-generation hardware,” explained Cerny. “So the co-developed algorithm has already been released by AMD as part of FSR 4 on PC. And we’re in the process of implementing it on PS5 and it will release next year on PS5 Pro.”
It is worth noting that these new algorithms will be coming to the PS5 Pro as part of an upgrade to Sony’s own PSSR, rather than full-fledged FSR 4. Despite this, Cerny also noted that “it’s not a cut-down [version] of the algorithm. It’s the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution that we’ll be releasing on PS5 Pro.”
Project Amethyst will also seemingly help push AMD’s PC graphics divisions even further, with Cerny noting that the work being done as part of the partnership is also contributing to AMD’s next-generation graphics technologies.
“Big chunks of RDNA 5, or whatever AMD ends up calling it, are coming out of engineering I am doing on the project,” he said. “And again, this is coming out of trying to move things forward. There are no restrictions on the way any of it can be used.”
“AMD is moving extremely quickly,” he continued, talking about the project’s timeline and how it will affect Sony’s console business. “What I’m trying to do is prepare for the next generation of consoles, so my time-frame is multi-year here.”
The upgrade to PSSR doesn’t yet have a solid release date. However, it is expected to come to PS5 Pro as a software update in 2026.
