An industry insider known for credible early leaks has said that Sony is developing its version of DLSS for the next PlayStation 5 console. It is no secret that Sony is believed to be releasing the PlayStation 5 Pro in fall 2024 but adding dedicated proprietary supersampling technology to it could be a game changer. Jeff Grubb (Giant Bomb/Jeff Grubb’s Game Mess, Venture Beat), said during a recent podcast that not only has he obtained confirmation about the forthcoming console’s fall 2024 release but Sony is now rumored to be working on a “DLSS-like” solution that will be introduced with it. Grubb dropped this bomb after covering Naughty Dog’s cancellation of The Last of Us online which was also revealed yesterday.
Per Game Mess (transcribed by VGC):
“The big thing here, like the big feature that this system will support, is Sony’s own proprietary DLSS-like solution, where they use their own machine learning to improve images so they can run things at a really high resolution and really high frame rate, and they would include their own hardware in the PS5 Pro to do this.
“That’s where like the 2x hardware ray tracing acceleration comes into place, but they would be able to do even more than just better hardware ray tracing. So yeah, this thing is probably happening.”
The rise of Supersampling
PC gamers have long been manually using similar techniques for decades to improve framerates and visual quality but NVIDIA took it to another level with DLSS when it introduced its first generation of RTX graphics cards which included dedicated hardware that uses machine learning to process supersampling data. Since then AMD and Intel have offered up their versions with FSR and Xess but neither of those require proprietary hardware and all have their pros and cons. It is clear, even as Sony is now rumored to be developing its supersampling technology, that hardware manufacturers plan to continue down this path to find more economical solutions for improved performance while attempting to keep costs lower.
Earlier this week other rumors suggested that the PlayStation 5 Pro will also feature an AMD Zen2 APU that includes a hybrid graphics solution using RDNA3 and RDNA4 technology. If true that Sony is working on its proprietary supersampling solution it would likely mean the console manufacturer would need to collaborate with AMD to develop it. A big unknown with this is whether or not game developers would have to include special coding to utilize the solution or if the console’s hardware could somehow implement the feature automatically, or perhaps users might have a system toggle to turn it on or off. Also, would users be given options for various quality levels for desired framerates or visual appearance?
Such solutions do offer a greater amount of gameplay flexibility but also require additional planning for their implementation by manufacturers and game developers. So far, all three GPU makers have seen their share of performance gains in games with them which is no doubt giving inspiration to the console manufacturer for its potential plans.