PS5 FSR4

The showcase app on a PS5, upscaling 640×360 to 1920×1080 at 60 fps. Both lenses magnify the same spot of a resolution chart four times: FSR 4 on the left, a bilinear upscale of the same frame on the right.

Warning

Experimental. FSR4 runs natively on the PS5 and passes its acceptance against the WARP reference in every captured scenario up to 2560×1440. Pre-releases carry the showcase app, the SDK and their source. The SDK is built from the BC250 RC11 build of AMD's FSR4 provider and needs a diagnostic profile of the Vulkan driver.

Important

Primary FSR4 porting credit: the BC250 FSR4 project. Our FSR4 effort builds on the pioneering work of dmoraza (dmorazasanchez) and daniel-h-0 and contributors, whose BC250 fork is our primary technical reference for FSR4 INT8 shader optimizations, provider tooling and reference workloads. AMD / GPUOpen created FSR4 itself. BlackBearReloaded's contribution here is the native PS5 adaptation, integration and validation. See full credits and source provenance.

A reusable FSR 4.1.1 INT8 SDK for native PS5 homebrew, running on Vulkan compute. The Vulkan driver is the external/ps5-vulkan submodule: BlackBearReloaded's fork of Manuel Pereira's ps5-vulkan. This project is independent of the upstream driver project.

Status: Experimental.

• The ps5_fsr4 runtime upscales 1280×720 to 1920×1080 on the PS5 in about 2.7 ms per frame, and outputs up to 3840×2160 (performance). Generated INT8 kernels run the network, including the postpass's learned head, faster than AMD's converted shaders and produce the same bytes.
• Every captured scenario up to 2560×1440 is accepted: static, motion, camera cut, SDR, dynamic resolution, sharpening, several output sizes, the 1080p and 1440p targets and AMD's Ultra Performance model for 3× upscaling. At 4K, motion and Ultra Performance pass too; in the static capture one frame of four misses the rule by 0.16 dB (validation).
• An interactive demo renders a scene, upscales it and presents it at 60 fps.
• The showcase app (PPSA99011) draws a city at dusk and upscales it at 60 fps. Its settings choose every quality mode at 1080p, 1440p and 4K output, with split views against bilinear and native rendering, a paired magnifier and a benchmark of the upscaler.
• GitHub Actions builds and tests everything from pinned public inputs for every pull request and, on main, when started by hand; a v* tag publishes a pre-release with the showcase app, the SDK and their source (releasing).
• tools/build_fsr4_sdk.py stages the SDK: libps5_fsr4.a, its header, notices and a warmed pipeline cache (FSR4 SDK).

Performance

Render → output	Mode	Time per frame	Share of a 60 fps frame
640×360 → 1920×1080	Ultra Performance	2.92 ms	18%
1280×720 → 1920×1080	Quality	2.95 ms	18%
1280×720 → 2560×1440	Performance	4.92 ms	30%
1706×960 → 2560×1440	Quality	4.95 ms	30%
1920×1080 → 3840×2160	Performance	10.86 ms	65%
1280×720 → 3840×2160	Ultra Performance	10.94 ms	66%

These times come from the headless benchmark (tools/build_fsr4_bench.py). It submits 1,800 frames back to back and times each from submission to completion on the GPU. The interactive demo paces frames at 60 fps and measures less: 2.66 ms for 1280×720 → 1920×1080. For that case AMD's converted shaders alone take 3.26 ms on the PS5, and 3.93 ms of GPU time on a BC250 at 1850 MHz.

The showcase app runs the same six cases on any console: Benchmark the six scenarios in its settings times each one and shows it beside this table.

tools/build_fsr4_perf_charts.py draws both charts from the measurements recorded in it.

Before and after

Captured on a PS5: FSR4 upscales 960×540 to 1920×1080 in about 2.7 ms. From a quarter of the pixels it comes closer to a 64× supersampled reference (37.5 dB) than native 1080p rendering does (31.2 dB).

At 4K: FSR4's Ultra Performance model upscales 1280×720, a ninth of the pixels, to 3840×2160 in 10.9 ms (headless benchmark). It comes closer to the reference (38.6 dB) than native 4K rendering does (34.0 dB).

Tip

Every comparison is in comparisons/: three shots of the demo scene at 1080p (from 1280×720 and 960×540), 1440p (from 1706×960 and 1280×720) and 4K (from 1920×1080 and 1280×720), with lossless full-size frames, 1:1 crops, 3× zooms, PSNR/SSIM against the supersampled reference and, at 1080p, an orbiting motion clip, all captured on the console.

Layout

Path	Contents
include/ps5fsr4/	Public C API
src/	Runtime: context, dispatch, constants and pass tables
tools/	Shader converter, reference exports, runtime/SDK/app builders, acceptance
tests/	Host tests
examples/	Runtime test, interactive demo, showcase app, comparison capture and replay witnesses
comparisons/	Before/after captures of the demo scene at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, built by tools/build_fsr4_comparisons.py
docs/	SDK guide, reference procedure, research notes, performance charts
external/ps5-vulkan/	The Vulkan driver (submodule)
.github/workflows/	The GitHub Actions build: tests, packages and pre-releases (releasing)

Clone with git clone --recurse-submodules, or let make fetch the driver, then follow BUILDING.md.

Development

• Build instructions
• Releasing
• FSR4 SDK
• Validation
• Implementation plan
• Reference tools
• Vulkan driver API

Keep test captures, logs and detailed results local. Commit code changes with brief descriptions. This repository remains public.

Credits

Built with the PS5 Payload SDK by John Törnblom (ps5-payload-dev). Third-party components, authors and licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

License

Copyright © 2026 BlackBearReloaded. Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE. Third-party components keep their own licenses. Binary releases are built from the tagged source in this repository.

Disclaimer

• No affiliation. This is an independent homebrew project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Sony Interactive Entertainment. "PlayStation", "PS5" and related marks are trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. AMD, FidelityFX and FSR are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., which does not endorse this project.
• No proprietary material. No Sony SDK, firmware, encryption keys or decrypted system modules are included.
• No warranty. This project is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, to the extent permitted by law. See sections 15 and 16 of the GPL.
• Use at your own risk. Running homebrew requires a modified console, which may void its warranty, breach the platform's terms of service, or cause data loss.
• Legal use only. Use it only with hardware, accounts and content you own. This project does not support or enable piracy.

AI assistance

This project was developed with AI assistance from OpenAI and/or Anthropic tools.