The PS5 Will Include PS4 Backwards Compatibility at Launch, But That's It (inputmag.com) 59
During today's PlayStation 5 livestream, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 and PS4 Pro games, but the company made no mention of retro PS1, PS2, and PS3 titles. From a report: Mark Cerny, Sony's lead system architect for PlayStation hardware, said the following about the PS5's backwards compatibility: "The PlayStation 5 GPU is backwards compatible with PlayStation 4. What does that mean? One way you can achieve backwards compatibility is to put the previous console's chips at in the new consoles like we did with some PlayStation 3s, but that's of course extremely expensive. A better way is to incorporate any differences in the previous console's logic into the new console's custom chips, meaning that even as the technology evolves, the logic and feature set that PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro titles rely on is still available in backwards compatibility modes. One advantage of this strategy is that once backwards compatibility is in the console, it's in, and it's not as if a cost-down will remove backwards compatibility like it did on PlayStation 3. Achieving this unification of functionality took years of efforts by AMD, as any roadmap advancement creates a potential divergence in logic."
Let's be realistic for a moment... (Score:5, Insightful)
PS2 could be done. (Score:3)
The PS5 is the equivalent of a beefy 2020-era computer and the PS4 is the equivalent of a moderately beefy 2016 computer. Both of them are capable of doing PS2 emulation if Sony cared enough to make it happen.
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Well, you look at PCSX2 and it is *almost* 100% and practically speaking good enough for almost all the games.
The problem is it is still only 'almost', and sometimes the 'almost' is a trivial thing like a minor graphical misrender but other times it can be severe. For example save points in Xenosaga crashing out the game.
The commercial value of across-the-board PS2 compatibility versus the risk and cost associated with providing it is low. They are happy to have game+bundled emulator for the most prolific
Re: PS2 could be done. (Score:3)
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I could not play a PS2 disc in post-launch PS3s. I would have had to download the PS2 title with bundled emulator.
They had control over which titles they bothered to test and configure an emulator for. Usually when a console promises BC, you imagine taking your old disc or cartridge and sticking it in new system and going. Not that title by title a decision is made and you have to buy the title again even if they do cover it in their emulation development/testing.
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There's a massive difference between a PC APU using 128-bit DDR4 and the PS4 APU using 256-bit GDDR5 when it comes to 'shared memory bandwidth' though.
I haven't had much luck with the emulators (Score:2)
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Could have been, but how much demand is there for PS1 game support these days? It's firmly in retro-gaming territory. Also, even emulators are not free - they don't cost anything per-device, but it would need very extensive testing - it would look really bad for Sony if people later discovered that they could play through *almost* all of one of the big titles, but it crashes at the final boss fight every time.
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it would look really bad for Sony if people later discovered that they could play through *almost* all of one of the big titles, but it crashes at the final boss fight every time.
Not that bad. Sony could issue a hotfix for that particular game once the problem was discovered.
Re: Let's be realistic for a moment... (Score:2)
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PS3 emulation is out there, and it does insanely well on pretty limited hardware. Way less than what's in the PS5. I'm sure if those devs had access to the full extent of technical information Sony engineers have, they could get 99% of PS3 games running considerably better than they ever ran on a PS3. In my opinion it's about whether or not it will make them money and nothing else. It doesn't just have to be a feature user want, they have to want it enough to cannibalize remake sales.
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Modern consoles are just weird looking PCs (Score:2)
It's an x86 cpu, you have to put effort into breaking compatibility (which of course often happens for business reasons).
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Re:Modern consoles are just weird looking PCs (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically the PS3 was the last gasp of oddly specific console development. It also suffered dearly, as lazy companies largely ignored the weird Cell and just used the generic ppc and GPU and PS3 ports were frequently terrible compared to an xbox360 that had a less theoretically powerful cpu, but the 'normal' bit was much more powerful than the normal subset of PS3.
The 'lazy' way for PS4/Xbone will end up with no hard baked assumptions about timings. Contrast with the old days of consoles where every little thing was micromanaged by necessity where the lazy way was to hardcode the timings. You would just about have to be intentionally trying to be annoying in a modern console to end up unable to deal with 'GPU+1' and 'CPU+1'. If it jumped processor architectures, that would be one thing. Jumping between GPU vendors *may* be tricky, but even then the platforms abstract so much that it would be probably ok.
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The PS4 made games use the OS for everything so it's kinda like running old Windows games on newer hardware.
When PS4 games run on the Pro sometimes they look a bit off. GT Sport for example, the trees look less realistic for some reason.
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"When PS4 games run on the Pro sometimes they look a bit off. GT Sport for example, the trees look less realistic for some reason."
Usually, in a game like that, I spend all of my time racing instead of stopping the car so I could better admire the trees.
As long as the graphics don't look like total shit, and there aren't any weird game breaking bugs/crashes, I don't mind the minor inaccuracies here and there.
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The PS3 isn't though. It runs a Cell processor - a very unusual chip. At the time it performed amazingly well, and was regarded as a potential future challenger to the mighty x86 - but then x86 kept on improving and rapidly overtook Cell, while the unconventional Cell architecture proved really hard to use for developers unfamiliar with it and lacking the extensive libraries and toolchains that x86 had. So the PS3 was the only major use of the Cell processor, making it very hard to emulate or to rebuild wit
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"...and was regarded as a potential future challenger to the mighty x86..."
No, it was not; not in any way, shape or form. Cell processors were never intended as general purpose processors.
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Not for desktop PCs. Scientific and other server-oriented workloads were another matter altogether.
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Nobody cares about BC (Score:1)
People buy new console to play new games. The whole BC thing is a red-herring, and always has been.
After all, if you have games for your PS1/2/3/4, don't you already own the console? Why do you care if the new console will play the games? And don't give me that "It's too many cables and I don't have room!" argument. That's crap.
And, as the summary said, adding BC costs money. Potentially quite a bit of money. I'd rather have either a cheaper PS5 with no BC, or a more expensive PS5 with more power-in-genera
Re:Nobody cares about BC (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, not just so much "too many cables"...but many people have limited entertainment center real estate.
At some point, if you have 14 different consoles all over your tables/entertainent centers, with switches to control al the different HDMI, etc connections (TV's and stereos do have limits)....well, at some point you're not going to be able to have them all up and available to play.
Once you get to that point, many will have to deal with WAF (Wife Approval Factor) which almost always leads towards the "Throw all that shit out, you're cluttering up my nice living room" type sentiment.
And for some reasons, with most men...the defer to the missus on this.
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In our place it's the HAF. I hate the clutter of junk in the living room. Mind you the difference is the Wii hasn't been turned on once since the Switch was bought, but somehow I still defer to the missus on this.
Happy wife happy .... more sex.
Re:Nobody cares about BC (Score:4, Insightful)
After all, if you have games for your PS1/2/3/4, don't you already own the console? Why do you care if the new console will play the games?
Having those old games and a broken console could be a use case.
Re: Nobody cares about BC (Score:1)
Re: Nobody cares about BC (Score:1)
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It's not that easy.
Both the PS2 and PS3 had *bizarre* hardware. They primarily relied on massive memory bandwidth, and lots of co-processors that all had to work in parallel on tiny chunks of data. It was a big challenge for developers to get the most out of those consoles, and few of them did.
It also makes it damn hard to emulate. The hardware doesn't "map" to anything else - it's unique.
As for sticking the "ASICs" in to a modern console - well, that costs money. Lots of money. And I imagine that nobody is
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PS1 emulators have been out for the PC since... geeze, I think before the PS2 came out. They took a beast of a machine to run at full speed at the time, but today's mediocre hardware wouldn't break a sweat. PS2 emulation is alive and well too. PS3 emulation is a considerably larger challenge - but emulators exist for Android for crying out loud - even if game compatibility is a bit lacking.
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And don't give me that "It's too many cables and I don't have room!" argument. That's crap.
I refuse to have more than 2 consoles out at a time. Right now those those are PS4 and Switch. Cabling IS a mess, even with just two. Never mind having old controllers lying around and trying to keep them charged.
PS2 compatibility would have been great.
Re: Nobody cares about BC (Score:1)
I refuse to have more than 2 consoles out at a time.
Sounds like a personal problem.
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Agreed. There's a small handful of old games I go back and play occasionally - they're not worth the clutter of having several consoles out.
Fortunately, emulation on the PC is cheap and easy, and comes with numerous enhancements to counterbalance the occasional quirks. Provided your old favorites don't include any of the (relatively few) unsupported games.
PS4 Was a Paperweight at My Home (Score:2)
I bought a PS4 in 2015 and have barely used it. There were all of 2 games that I played on it a lot - the final Batman Arkham game and Tomb Raider (which I think was also available for the PS3). I bought Fallout 4 and maybe got 10 hours out of it before I finally came to grips with the disappointment and I put it down. For the most part my PS4 just collected dust all these years.
But I have a very large collection of PS3 games that I still re-play some times. Just the other night I started playing Dead Islan
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Fallout 4 isn't a bad game, really. I get the impression the entire development team didn't really 'get' fallout - they were just picking all the elements one expects from previous fallout games and throwing them together. Nothing in the setting actually made sense - but it has super-mutants and ghouls and knights in power armor and vaults, so it must be fallout.
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It might be an OK game on it's own - I wouldn't even know. It came with the promise of being Fallout and then didn't feel like at all like the Fallout that I know and love and was looking forward to. It was like watching the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies after growing up on Roddenberry's Trek. Maybe if it had been branded something other than 'Fallout' it would have landed because my expectations would have been different. But the marketing made me expect Fallout and so that's how I judged it. I don't think th
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It did rather feel like the future decades after the war, rather than centuries. No rebuilding. No new governments, even local, beyond a small town in a baseball stadium. Rubble and ruin.
I liked the combat mechanics more. It forced you to become proficient in multiple weapons and styles. No one method would win every fight without consuming too much of one type of ammo - you couldn't just use the Skyrim method of upgrading destruction and fireball-spamming everyone and everything in your path.
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If that's all you've used your PS4 games for this generation, you're missing out. IMHO, the PS4 didn't really hit it's stride until 2017, but it's been putting out bangers since then. I'm in my mid-thirties and have been a gamer since the Atari generation, and I think you can make a compelling argument that 2017-2018 were some of the best years in the history of gaming.
While it may seem like a lot of PS4 games are just a nicer can of paint on PS1/PS2 games, that's generally not the case. There's been sub
Leave it to the emulators (Score:2)
Specs disappointing (Score:2)
Well, because they are both disguised PCs. (Score:2)
The PS3, 2 and 1 are custom systems. Portability is very non-trivial.
Although if the PS4 could do it, so can the PS5, as the same compatibility layers should be portable.
will any PS4 games get updates to use PS5 hardware (Score:2)
will any PS4 games get updates to use PS5 hardware??
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I'm certainly hoping so. Especially the VR stuff, much of which needs all the help it can get. Especially the VR stuff - a demanding game like No Man's Sky could put the anemic PSVR pixel count to much better use with a lot more rendering power under the hood.
Of course, there will likely be a PSVR2 before too long as well, so there's a chance they might just release a whole new version for the PS5. Much more profitable than releasing an update as well.
Who cares about the PS3? (Score:2)
I want to know if it'll play my Wii U games!
If you're on PC (Score:3)
As expected if you knew anything (Score:2)
Anyone who was pushing PS3 back compat (except through PS Now streaming) was full of it.
The PS3's design was so defective that short of including the PS3 hardware in the PS5 there's no way in hell you were going to get a software emulator to work at the level required for general back compatibility.
Yes there are PS3 emulators for the PC. They are riddled with compatibility issues that would be unacceptable for Sony saying 'this is PS3 back compatible.'
Not So Powerful--If It Cannot Emulate (Score:2)
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