PlayStation 5 Getting Major Upgrade in 2026

The PlayStation 5 Pro is already one of the most impressive consoles on the market, offering unparalleled performance and visual fidelity, improving so much on the original release console that it's kind of its own thing at this point.

With the PlayStation 6 seemingly still some years away, there isn't really a need for any improvement on the existing hardware in the intervening, but that's not going to stop Sony from doing it anyway, and we're quite pleased about the whole thing.

PS5 Pro owners have some significant upgrades to look forward to in 2026, and they should really make a noticeable difference to the console's capabilities. As reported by Tweak Town, Sony will release a new upgraded version of its in-house PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technology that should show big gains in fidelity and performance.

The new advancements are based on AMD's FSR 4 tech, though Sony has been at pains to clarify that this absolutely won't include native FSR 4 support for the console.

Early leaks that suggested this might be happening detailed that the tech would be rolled out in its standard AMD FS4 format. This was close to the truth, but the reality is better news for owners of the console because, while the new update is based on FS4, PSSR has a bespoke design that makes it far better suited to console gaming, and the performance should improve significantly as a result.

The advancements made are genuinely pretty staggering, with PSSR essentially serving as a custom built neural network that takes advantage of the PS5 Pro's custom RDNA architecture that speeds up RAM access.

All of that is pretty complicated, so PS5 Pro architect Mark Cerny shared how it works in layman's terms on the official YouTube channel for the console, saying "PC games tend to render at a fixed resolution and frame rate that varies based on scene complexity. Gaming monitors can handle that varying frame rate."

"In contrast, console games tend to have a frame rate that's fixed because they're displaying on a 60FPS TV. What varies is the rendering resolution. If the scene is complex, then the rendering resolution is lower... Since the display resolution is usually fixed at 4K, PSSR needs to handle a continuously-changing upscaling ratio. That scenario is primarily what we designed for and trained for."

There's no exact release date for when the new advancements will hit consoles beyond 2026, but the company has promised to share more details soon, so hopefully we won't have too long to wait.