Did Sony waste time/money on its own AI upscaler?

Waste of time and money

  • No

    Votes: 149 64.8%

  • Yes

    Votes: 81 35.2%
  • Total voters
    230
Donald mac Ronald

Donald mac Ronald

Member
It's great that a console maker decided to take the initiative before the next gen starts.
If anything it will force AI scalers to be used next gen for consoles.
I haven't played on a pro so don't have an experience with it or pssr.

What we do know is next gen will see AMD again and they're about to release their own real AI upscaler which anyone with half a brain cell would have known, including Sony.

So why develop one when AMD are going to do it for you and it's their graphics hardware. It's mostly likely we will see a scaler in Microsoft final Xbox and AMD will probably do it for then. It's most likely going to be better. As someone who uses dlss I'm confident amds solution will be pretty solid
 
Donald Trump Ugh GIF by Election 2016
 
Probably. The GPU manufacturers are already forced to do it and the next play station will use one of those gpus. Unless sonys upscaling is vastly better than AMD's then i dont really see the point
 
No I don't think so, Sony engineers are very competent and PSSR V1 for a first effort is very good.

It'll only get better and by the time PS6 comes along I can see PSSR being extremely good with their 1st party studios being able to use it to it's full potential.
 
I don't think so.

Sony has made questionable decisions throughout the decade, but investing in their own AI Upscaling was certainly not one of them. It's fantastic.

Sure, there have been a few bumps they've been encountering, but I would tip my hat to the console maker who is at least making an effort to do so.

Nintendo may be on a similar path, but unlike Sony, they've been having to use outdated NVIDIA hardware for the Switch 2 to use DLSS and we're not sure if it'll be good for third-party games - let alone first-party games - and whether it can receive updates through patches.
 
Donald mac Ronald said:
Nvidia said it had what a gfx server farm or supercomputer training on dlss for 6 years. Doesn't sound cheap.
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i remember Cerny talking about it. if I remember/interpreted correctly, it sounded like Pisser is more focused/tailored/very specific (not as sophisticated as Nvidia's) in the what it works and what is trying to accomplished.
 
What? No... It'll be used in other iterations of Playstation. Why would you go an assume it's going to be used only this one time?
 
Donald mac Ronald said:
It's great that a console maker decided to take the initiative before the next gen starts.
If anything it will force AI scalers to be used next gen for consoles.
I haven't played on a pro so don't have an experience with it or pssr.

What we do know is next gen will see AMD again and they're about to release their own real AI upscaler which anyone with half a brain cell would have known, including Sony.

So why develop one when AMD are going to do it for you and it's their graphics hardware. It's mostly likely we will see a scaler in Microsoft final Xbox and AMD will probably do it for then. It's most likely going to be better. As someone who uses dlss I'm confident amds solution will be pretty solid
Click to expand...

AMD and Sony collaborated in developing their own AI temporal upscaler, resulting in FSR4 and PSSR.
And both companies announced their partnership is now even closer. So they are sharing know how and development costs.
 
Brakum said:
Probably. The GPU manufacturers are already forced to do it and the next play station will use one of those gpus. Unless sonys upscaling is vastly better than AMD's then i dont really see the point
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a) They control it so they aren't at the mercy of the vendors (also if they were to ever change a vendor).
b) One potential future of rendering pipelines is to entirely abstract the pixel generation from the developer. In such a case - the platform holder would particularly want to control the core algorithms behind the scenes as part of their ecosystem (eg. Apple tried this but because of how catastrophically VisionPro failed, it may be awhile before we see it again).
 
Wasting money is the only thing Sony was doing this last couple years

PS5 pro
Pssr
Bought lots of trash tier Studios
Greenlit lots of trash games
Concord
Gaas
 
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PSSR is an investment towards the future of playstation as a whole and so no it's not a waste of money and it's ridiculous to think so. Creating their own upscaler allows them to change/improve what they want without interference from anyone else and it means that they don't have to pay a charge to use third party upscalers. It's also incredibly smart to create an upscaler and use a mid-gen refresh to test it because it allows you to collect years of data on said upscaler to use and improve upon the base of it for when you eventually launch your next system.
 
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Waste of time? Probably not, the people who did the work probably enjoyed it to some extent.
Waste of money? No, the money has not been wasted, it has simply changed owners.
 
No, it's good to have their own stuff to depend less on others and be able to tweak it more depending on their needs, which aren't the same ones than the AMD ones. As a result, PSSR performed better than the AMD ones do in PC.

On top of this, this research made here later can help when researching other stuff.
 
That's money they save on not paying for other people's solutions and it apparently surpassed what AMD was doing.

Sony is a huge company and this tech can get leveraged into their other businesses as well.
 
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PSSR either ends up as a stop gap solution for PS5Pro, or Sony's divergent (to AMD) road map to AI upscaling. Don't think that PS5Pro APU can run full FSR4 and Sony didn't want to wait for PS6 to provide AI upscaling to its console. Who knows?
 
ChorizoPicozo said:
i remember Cerny talking about it. if I remember/interpreted correctly, it sounded like Pisser is more focused/tailored/very specific (not as sophisticated as Nvidia's) in the what it works and what is trying to accomplished.
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Yeah he made reference to consoles favouring dynamic resolution over variable frame rate. From memory that was a key reason for taking it in house.
 
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For me abandoning the Cell processor was a mistake. It is such a great technology and innovation that even medical field used the technology. Even banned to be exported to China due to its technology might use in military. Even some developers loved it like Capcom, etc, Sony just made a mistake on not providing enough tools and knowledge base library. Cell could have been big this days and more advance, and it could have been a perfect complement to ML AI. I don't want Sony to make the same mistake of abandoning there own technology because of pressure from out side forces, even if its a good piece of tech. Ps5 pro PSSR is already performing very well at a fast pace, and developers are now getting use to it. And for $699 that is already cheap for an AI upscaling capable technology and stutter free.
 
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Looked good at first, so it can be good

Maybe it's hard or just lazy development to implement right
 
Donald mac Ronald said:
It's great that a console maker decided to take the initiative before the next gen starts.
If anything it will force AI scalers to be used next gen for consoles.
I haven't played on a pro so don't have an experience with it or pssr.

What we do know is next gen will see AMD again and they're about to release their own real AI upscaler which anyone with half a brain cell would have known, including Sony.

So why develop one when AMD are going to do it for you and it's their graphics hardware. It's mostly likely we will see a scaler in Microsoft final Xbox and AMD will probably do it for then. It's most likely going to be better. As someone who uses dlss I'm confident amds solution will be pretty solid
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maybe because it would require royalties? Or maybe because it might not be built directly for the future set of components Sony is planning for next generation? I have it feeling it's just this gens version of checker board rendering and it will fall to the wayside in 4-5 years but I could be wrong. We just dont know that answer
 
winjer said:
AMD and Sony collaborated in developing their own AI temporal upscaler, resulting in FSR4 and PSSR.
And both companies announced their partnership is now even closer. So they are sharing know how and development costs.
Click to expand...
Should have just developed one together. Way too many on the market. TAA, TSR, FSR3, FSR4, IGTI (probably won't be used any more), DLSS, XeSS, and whatever solution GG uses for Forbidden West on the Pro.
 
"How does it work with Unreal?" is damn near the only thing that's going to matter moving forward. Is it tangibly better than TSR in native Unreal games?
 
Donald mac Ronald said:
So why develop one when AMD are going to do it for you and it's their graphics hardware. It's mostly likely we will see a scaler in Microsoft final Xbox and AMD will probably do it for then. It's most likely going to be better. As someone who uses dlss I'm confident amds solution will be pretty solid
Click to expand...
Why pay to license something when you can make your own?

This is technology that, down the line, can be applied to other areas within Sony Corp, so in the long run, it's cheaper and better to research and develop their own.
 
It's a partnership, isn't it? When that story broke, it read to me that AMD and Sony were collaborating on their AI/upscale efforts. I would not be surprised if they are sharing technology and helping each other advance to compete with Nvidia.
 
Isn't AMD's upcoming upscaler literally utilizing results generated from the R&D SIE put into PSSR? I think Mark Cerny said something to that effect in the PS5 Pro deep dive.

If that's the case, seems like reason enough for PSSR to exist. Also there's no telling if SIE and AMD may have divergences later on in how they want to implement new approaches, so it's generally better to have options than to not have them.

crazepharmacist said:
It's a partnership, isn't it? When that story broke, it read to me that AMD and Sony were collaborating on their AI/upscale efforts. I would not be surprised if they are sharing technology and helping each other advance to compete with Nvidia.
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Yeah, this. The two are working in tandem and will probably produce forks in the future with some small-level divergences, but more or less be similar. But, they will utilize R&D both companies are pooling together for it and related technologies.

StereoVsn said:
Chinese AI was made for 1/80th of Concorde! 😉
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Or 1/3rd of Nvidia 😂
 
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Having your own model that can be ported to another manufacturer is not optimal but is tactically flexible. If for PS7 the SoC is made by other than AMD they can keep their advances.
 
crazepharmacist said:
It's a partnership, isn't it? When that story broke, it read to me that AMD and Sony were collaborating on their AI/upscale efforts. I would not be surprised if they are sharing technology and helping each other advance to compete with Nvidia.
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Yeah I answered no to the poll because I am pretty sure that they were working together and that PSSR and FSR4 will be forks of the same upscaler.
 
Donald mac Ronald said:
It's great that a console maker decided to take the initiative before the next gen starts.
If anything it will force AI scalers to be used next gen for consoles.
I haven't played on a pro so don't have an experience with it or pssr.

What we do know is next gen will see AMD again and they're about to release their own real AI upscaler which anyone with half a brain cell would have known, including Sony.

So why develop one when AMD are going to do it for you and it's their graphics hardware. It's mostly likely we will see a scaler in Microsoft final Xbox and AMD will probably do it for then. It's most likely going to be better. As someone who uses dlss I'm confident amds solution will be pretty solid
Click to expand...

Pretty sure Microsoft are working on making DirectX do this.

www.tomshardware.com

Microsoft prepares DirectX neural rendering for AI-powered graphics

DirectX will soon gain neural rendering capabilities.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
 
maybe?
depends if FSR4 is able to run on the PS5 Pro GPU without a large performance penalty.

Sony probably thought they can't wait for AMD to get their asses in motion already. given how behind the times AMD is with basically everything, it's hard to give them any trust to actually keep up.
 
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Sony would've done this regardless of whether or not AMD had their own solution coming. They use in-house developed upscaling technology in their cameras and TVs with this just being the next evolution of that with AI now being the new thing.
 
That's a difficult question if we don't know the actual costs. How much did they need to spend on the GPU's and how many ML engineers did they assign and for how long?

Probably a waste of time considering Nvidia is, I think, always going to be a step ahead of the competition seeing as how they make the hardware everyone uses to run these algorithms.
 
{insert code here} said:
That's a difficult question if we don't know the actual costs. How much did they need to spend on the GPU's and how many ML engineers did they assign and for how long?

Probably a waste of time considering Nvidia is, I think, always going to be a step ahead of the competition seeing as how they make the hardware everyone uses to run these algorithms.
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They may run the algorithm with their hardware, but it's not useful if it's not being utilized in the console space. DLSS may always be a step ahead, but until Sony or Microsoft starts using Nvidia hardware for their next machines, it's pointless to even bring them up. It's either relying on AMD and wait another 3-4 years or, in Sony's case, co-developing to be a step ahead. They also have a supposed handheld being released next gen and I'm sure PSSR is going to be an integral feature just like DLSS is supposedly going to be with the Switch 2.
 
Nah.
For better or worse upscaling will probably be a big factor for consoles moving forward, so I think Sony investing in developing their own tech and gaining experience in the field is worth it.

Seems like a better alternative than depending 100% on AMD for everything relating to upscaling on their future consoles
 
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JaksGhost said:
They may run the algorithm with their hardware, but it's not useful if it's not being utilized in the console space. DLSS may always be a step ahead, but until Sony or Microsoft starts using Nvidia hardware for their next machines, it's pointless to even bring them up. It's either relying on AMD and wait another 3-4 years or, in Sony's case, co-developing to be a step ahead. They also have a supposed handheld being released next gen and I'm sure PSSR is going to be an integral feature just like DLSS is supposedly going to be with the Switch 2.
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Good fucking point man. Completely missed the fact that Sony runs AMD hardware lol.
 
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