Sony has announced a new AI-based upscaling technology for the standard PS5, called Quick Spectral Super Resolution, or QSSR. It’s essentially a lighter, faster version of the PS5 Pro’s existing PSSR technology, built specifically to run on the original console. If you’d like it simpler, free gains, people.

Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei are the first games to support it, with patches going live today that add QSSR as a new graphics option that you can turn on and off. Sony says the technology will also be made available to PlayStation developers, so the hope is that it starts turning up in both future releases and old ones if they decide to revisit them.

The simple version is that games often render at a lower resolution internally because doing everything at full 4K is bloody taxing on the hardware. They then use upscaling to turn that lower-resolution image into something closer to a 4K or 1440p picture. The problem is that conventional upscaling can leave fine details looking soft, unstable or shimmery, especially in motion.

Sony says QSSR uses AI to analyse the image and do a better job of rebuilding that missing detail. In its announcement, the company claims it improves both image detail and stability, while Sucker Punch says it can resolve fine details in characters and environments with a level of temporal stability that had not previously been possible on standard PS5 hardware.

That probably sounds like pure marketing speak, because it mostly is pure marketing speak. What it means in practice is less flickering foliage, cleaner thin objects such as railings and wires, and a sharper image while the camera is moving around. The comparison footage Sony has released shows this most clearly in Ghost of Yōtei’s grass and some of Wolverine’s busier city environments. And the improvements are…well, not huge, to be fair. But still good.

However, this is not Sony somehow giving the standard PS5 all the benefits of a PS5 Pro for free. The Pro has dedicated machine-learning hardware and can usually work toward a 4K output, whereas QSSR has been rebuilt around the considerably more limited base console. Sony’s Daniel Craig told Digital Foundry that developers on PS5 will need to be more flexible with both their internal rendering resolution and their final output target depending on the graphics mode.

Speaking of, Digital Foundry’s early testing suggests that 1440p is a more natural target for QSSR, rather than 4K, and that it can cost a little performance compared with a conventional upscaler. In other words, a developer may choose to render at a lower internal resolution to keep a 60fps mode running smoothly, then use QSSR to make the resulting image look far better than it otherwise would.

That is still potentially a pretty big deal. A lot of current-gen games have been forced to make ugly compromises in their performance modes, particularly when it comes to image quality. Digital Foundry says QSSR’s potential is “remarkable,” noting that low resolutions and poor upscaling have affected plenty of games this generation, while describing the improvement in Marvel’s Wolverine as potentially exceptional.

It is also apparently not too awkward for developers to add. Craig says QSSR is “fundamentally a drop-in replacement” for games already using PSSR on PS5 Pro, although teams will still need a few days to tune settings around it. That doesn’t guarantee a wave of retroactive patches, obviously, but it does make the technology much more likely to be used than if every studio had to rebuild half its rendering pipeline.

For now, QSSR is a developer-controlled graphics option rather than a system-wide PS5 update that improves every game overnight. Still, it is a genuinely nice bit of late-generation support for the millions of people who quite reasonably did not fancy spending PS5 Pro money just to get cleaner grass.

Basically, QSSR lets the regular PS5 make a lower-resolution picture look cleaner and less wibbly without first having to summon £700 from your wallet for a PS5 Pro.