If you thought that Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS were the only upscaling tech you needed, it appears that Sony is about to enter the fray with its next rumored console. According to Jeff Grubb of Gaint Bomb, he’s been able to confirm the leak of a PS5 Pro being due in 2024, and in turn, the existence of a proprietary Sony alternative to DLSS.
While the existence of a Sony-developed DLSS solution is unlikely to have much impact on the PC game market, it’s curious to see them take a stab at this for console gaming. Nvidia has led the way on upscaling technology, but it’s easy to assume such innovations are simply not needed on home consoles given the stuck nature of their graphical output.
Speaking on episode 328 of the Game Mess Decides podcast, Grubb notes that the “DLSS-like solution” is set to be a big hardware innovation, and would allow Sony to increase the resolution and frame rate of games while introducing better visual fidelity and more graphical depth.
Sony targeting this kind of hardware-driven improvement could be a bit scary to hear if you’re Microsoft, but ultimately in the PC space, it’s a non-starter.
Nvidia will continue to lead the way with DLSS, while both AMD and Intel will follow suit with their respective solutions. The graphical setup of games on PC needs to account for multiple levels of hardware across a range of manufacturers, so it will always be a more complex market to crack and it’s virtually impossible for anyone other than the above companies to make a mark.
Unless Sony announces that it is about to enter the GPU market – which is about as likely as Game Pass on PS5 – we can safely watch from afar to see what it develops and identify if any aspects could be introduced to the PC space.
The practical use case for console DLSS would realistically be stabilizing game performance at higher resolutions. As an example, Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 runs at approximately 55 fps in performance mode on PS5 and drops below the 30 mark at times in quality mode. With a DLSS solution, this performance could be stabilized entirely, or even pushed to the next level, with quality mode pushing 60 fps and performance mode achieving 120.
On PC, even with graphics cards that are pushing up against the system requirements, it’s possible to get performance that is better than expected with DLSS and this is what Sony is chasing.
While a Sony DLSS alternative is intriguing, it’s safe to say that PC gamers won’t be impacted by the end product. Instead, check out our list of the best games released in 2023 for some inspiration for what to play next.