Sony has continued improving its PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution technology—available exclusively on PS5 Pro for now—for quite some time. Aside from its partnership with AMD, there have also been rumors about what form these improvements might take, but a new patent filed by the company in July 2025 offers some hints. Having been officially published on February 4th, it features several diagrams for a “computer-implemented method of generating a multi-frame super resolution”.
Dubbed MFSR, the technology uses a trained artificial neural network to take graphics data created by a game as input, with the output being a higher-resolution image. The technology is also capable of monitoring the console’s processing load during gameplay and making the necessary adjustments to ensure higher-quality outputs.
Sony acknowledges that, while MSFR has been around for some time (with technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR), it often faces issues when the hardware load is at a high point. This can be tackled by using concepts like dynamic resolution, which also comes with its own caveats, such as increased processing loads and lower-resolution images being output.
“By (e.g. dynamically) varying a precision of the weights and/or activations used in performing the multi-frame super resolution, the present invention advantageously optimises memory access and computation times for generating the MFSR graphics output in dependence on the monitored usage of the processing unit during gameplay. For example, if the usage of the processing unit increases, then the precision of the weights and/or activations may be reduced in response to the detected increase, in order that the computation time of the MFSR graphics output is reduced.”
The description of this patent falls in line with rumors from back in December about PSSR 2 not simply being a minor update. The report spoke about MFSR2 (Multi-Frame Super Resolution 2) based on an updated algorithm. The technology is expected to reduce the need for some pieces of input data, resulting in a smaller footprint for processing loads and memory usage. “This is not some ‘0.5’ upgrade,” said an anonymous developer.
The same developer also noted that PSSR, FSR 3 and FSR 4 were all mentioned separately, indicating that AMD and Sony look at these technologies as distinct. While many improvements are slated to arrive on PS5 Pro based on FSR 4, PSSR 2 itself is seemingly slated for a later, standalone release.
AMD and Sony had previously discussed the new technologies they had been working on together. Regarding FSR and PSSR, PS5 and PS5 Pro lead architect Mark Cerny noted that implementing new systems without heavily raising hardware usage is the biggest obstacle.
“The challenge comes in how we implement these systems,” explained Cerny. “The neural networks found in technologies like FSR and PSSR are incredibly demanding on the GPU. They’re both computationally intensive and require speedy access to large amounts of memory. The nature of the GPU fights us here.”
For more details about the collaboration between Sony and AMD, check out our deep dive.
