Mark Cerny: PS5 Pro Getting an Upgrade in 2026 With Replacement to Current PSSR - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 July 2025 / 3,526 Views
PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny in an interview with Tom's Guide discussed the upgrade coming to PlayStation 5 Pro in 2026.
Earlier this year it was revealed Sony was working with AMD to have something similar to the FSR 4 upscaler available on the PS5 Pro in 2026, which was described "as the next evolution of PSSR."
Cerny has now stated the new upscaling tech "is a drop-in replacement for the current PSSR" that should be straightforward for developers to use once it releases next year.
He suggests that the upscaler coming next year is no weaker or less than AMD's FSR 4.
"It's not a cut-down [version] of the algorithm," said Cerny. "It's the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution that we'll be releasing on PS5 Pro."
Cerny added, "This is not for proprietary technology. 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 execs Jack Huynh stated "Mark makes us a better company. We push each other."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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I'm trying to grasp what this means for existing PS5 Pro owners. Is this something handled on the software side? Or will this upgrade only be possible by buying new hardware?
This is a major software upgrade, you won’t be buying a new “Pro of Pro” console.
Will impact PS6 development and for current gen it will likely push devs to use the software upgrade when it drops next year so they can get a head start on PS6 port development.
So a win win for AMD, Sony, devs and current PSpro owners.
Software upgrade, essentially PSSR is being upgraded to FSR4
This is absolutely the right call and a great thing for PS5 Pro owners. I personally cannot stand FSR 2/3 upscaling - it just looks horrible, with the softness and flickering. PSSR, as is, is hugely better but still has lots of problem with image instability. FSR4 though, AMD has finally gotten it right and it looks great. I would put FSR4 as equal in quality to DLSS3, but below NVIDIA's latest DLSS4 Transformer model.
Personally didn't mind FSR2... But somehow FSR3 looked worse lol
haha, well of course everyone has their own opinions on image quality, but I dunno. FSR 1/2/3 are all garbage to me lol. We went from an era of mostly 720p games on PS3/Xbox 360 being played on 1080p TVs, where the console itself did no upscaling. So it was on the TV to do that, resulting in lots of "soft" looking games since those 1080p TVs had generally very basic upscalers in them. Then we had 1080p native or 4K checkerboard games on PS4, being played on now mostly 4K TVs. This was a return to things looking fairly sharp, like the older PS2 games being played on CRT TVs at their time. I miss that haha
Now, we have hardly any native 4K PS5 titles on still 4K TVs. Nearly every title relies on upscaling in some way or another. Some game engines are really good at that (like Decima, with Horizon Forbidden West and Death Stranding 2). But a lot of others relying on FSR or the basic Unreal Engine TSR just don't look good at all.
I find it hilarious that a lot of Switch 2 games look vastly superior to most PS5 games in that pure sharpness image quality area, looking razer sharp on 4Ks when docked.
As PC user who has access to FSR4... It still has areas where it still falls short, it's leagues better than FSR 2/3, but I personally still prefer native resolution over upscaling still due to fizzle and breakup.
Things like hair tends to exhibit a dithering artifact in games like Oblivion Remastered for example.
But it's a good sign that AMD and Sony are working together to make the technology competent instead of having it as a "one hit wonder" where they move onto the next thing.
The PS5 pro does not have RDNA 4; so I guess it cannot be the full thing right?
PSSR can continue to grow and evolve while they move towards their goals of how it will work on future hardware. But updates and upgrades will work on Pro for the foreseeable future.
Both wrong and right: PS5 Pro is again a hybrid architecture of AMD's. It is more or less RDNA 3, but with upgraded ML and Ray Tracing units closer to RDNA 4. Other aspects like the main ROPs and texture units are base RDNA 3. So yes, although it is not RDNA 4, it is the ML hardware that is important for FSR 4 and those units are close to (maybe equal to, not sure) to RDNA 4.
Someone has already gotten FSR 4 backported to run on RDNA 3 (and 2). and you can see why AMD restricted its use to Radeon RX 9000 series only. It does work just fine, bringing over all the image quality enhancements, but because of the weaker ML hardware in those older architectures, it barely increased the framerate at all as you would expect an upscaler to do.
It doesn't need RDNA4.
It just needs to support the same number formats as RDNA4.
PS5 Pro supports FP8, INT8, INT16... But it does lack dedicated hardware for Matrix operations, bfloat and so forth...
But there is really no hindrance to getting ML working on the PS5 Pro, they just need to use higher precision at the cost of performance.
when PSSR was first being talked about, all i could think of was how games could benefit the Series X ML capabilities now if there are cross platform releases. It had ML hardware from the beginning, but the base 5 did not... so nobody really put it to use. Then the Pro comes along and supports it and people still don't put it to use in the SX.
Essay Pro