If you own a regular PS5 rather than a Pro, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 now looks sharper and steadier after an update that adds Sony’s QSSR upscaling. Several other games are lined up behind it.
QSSR, short for Quick Spectral Super Resolution, is an AI-guided upscaler that renders a game at lower resolution and rebuilds a cleaner image. Sony pitches it as a fix for shimmering edges and soft fine detail, and says it beats the conventional upscalers consoles have relied on. Insomniac says the gain shows in both the Fidelity and Performance modes of Spider-Man 2.
The technology was introduced last month, and Sony’s PlayStation Blog post now names the next wave. Remedy’s Control Resonant gets it in an update planned for December. No Man’s Sky is due to get QSSR “in the next few weeks”, according to Hello Games’ founder Sean Murray. Embark Studios is adding it to ARC Raiders and The Finals, and Expression Games is bringing it to Hell Let Loose: Vietnam in an upcoming update. Only Control Resonant has a month attached.
QSSR shares its programming interface with PSSR, the upscaler on the PS5 Pro. That matters for studios: a game that already supports PSSR is, in Sony’s words, a natural fit. Sony adds that both grew out of Project Amethyst, its joint effort with AMD.
The developers’ own comments give a sense of why they signed up. Remedy’s Erik Jansson says QSSR gives Control Resonant “a much more stable and detailed image”, and that the studio coordinated with Sony on the update. Embark Studios’ Mikael Linderholm points to “increased sharpness, better environmental clarity and overall visual improvements” for ARC Raiders and The Finals. Hello Games says it cares about the quality of every pixel in No Man’s Sky, a game where every star is a visitable solar system, and expects QSSR to deliver the best possible framerate alongside the cleaner image.
Insomniac’s Mike Fitzgerald says the studio saw “great results” integrating QSSR in Marvel’s Wolverine and chose to bring it to its 2023 game as well. That makes Spider-Man 2 a back-catalogue update rather than a new release, which is the pattern Sony describes: Sony’s argument is that a matching interface makes QSSR an easy step for games that already support PSSR.
Sony frames the rollout as proof that the PS5, now six years old, is still improving. The company says developers have shown plenty of interest since the launch of QSSR last month, and that updates will keep arriving over the coming weeks as each studio ships its patch.
Nothing in the post says whether the feature is switched on by default or sits in a settings menu, and no full list of supported games has been published. Sony says more titles will follow in the coming months.
