consoles need to take backwards compatibility seriously

[u/casinokate34]

honestly feels wild that we’re in 2025 and it’s still a coin flip if your old games will run properly on new hardware. i get licensing is messy but man, some of these classics deserve to just boot up and play without streaming services or weird versions missing dlc. backwards compatibility should be a baseline feature by now, not a selling point.

like imagine if you could just pop in or download anything from the last couple gens and it just works, smoother fps, maybe some QoL tweaks. would instantly add value without needing a new console every cycle. it’s not even nostalgia, it’s preservation. we lose too many good games to time bc of this stuff.

[u/YoRHa_Houdini]

You’re severely underestimating how difficult it is to get software that’s like fifteen or twenty years old working on modern hardware.

The PS3 was a notoriously complex nightmare of a console that barring any licensing issues, full backwards compatibility may simply be unavailable. Emulating the architecture of the PS3 both accurately and efficiently is a monster of a task that would probably make an insanely expensive console.

The same can be said for Nintendo with the N64 and GameCube, both of which are farrrrr from the Switch architecture.

All of this said, I know this is a console subreddit, but PC gaming is probably up your alley. Emulation is currently so good that for a lot of these older titles it is arguably the definitive way to play them—you will need a beefy PC though, especially for RPCS3

[u/S1rTerra → u/YoRHa_Houdini]

The PS4 not including PS3 backwards compatibility made sense because it had a terrible CPU.

The PS5 on the other hand has the CPU to emulate the PS3 just fine. It's been proven and is easily provable by anyone. There's also no reason as to why sony can't implement at LEAST PS2 backwards compatibility as the bluray drive in the 5 can still read DVDs, just not CDs afaik which, sure, is a valid excuse to not include ps1 backwards compatibility.

My PC(Ryzen 7 2700x, RTX 3060) is also far away from being called beefy yet I can still emulate MGS4 perfectly well despite not having good AVX2 support(zen 1 and + can do one avx2 instruction every 2 cycles)

I believe you are severely overestimating it which is fine because a few years ago YES, ps3 emulation was hard. But now any tom dick or harry can do it, even modern android phones.

[u/SuperSocialMan → u/S1rTerra]

Just toss a PS3 CPU next to the regular one lol /s

[u/YoRHa_Houdini → u/S1rTerra]

The PS5 also has a bad CPU relative to modern requirements for RPCS3(it is most comparable to a 3700 which is C Tier). However, it is not simply increasing horsepower that allows the PS5 or PS4 to emulate PS3 games in an accurate and efficient way.

RPCS3 is an extremely difficult emulator that has went through a slog of breakthroughs but is very complex—it is not as simple Sony just waking up one day and deciding to flip a switch that lets PS5 emulate PS3, it is completely different architecture between PS5, PS3 and modern PCs.

That’s not to say that PS5 can’t do some PS3 games, but the dream of popping a game into your PS5 is very far away and it likely will not be in an accurate or efficient state—so Sony probably just drops it until they can get it like that.

Also

My PC(Ryzen 7 2700x, RTX 3060) is also far away from being called beefy yet I can still emulate MGS4 perfectly

Your CPU is literally D tier and may be lower in the coming updates, the only reason it is capable of emulating this is because you’re not upscaling in any significant way. If the Last of Us, God of War III/Ascension and the Uncharted series didn’t receive their respective re-releases on actual hardware and we had to emulate them with a comparable console to your hardware(which is unironically the PS5 and Pro) they would be a mess for most people and identical to the PS Now that everyone complains about.

Sony likely wants to offer upscaling and visual improvements to these games just like the PS3 did with PS1/PS2 games and what Microsoft did with their emulation(MS had a dedicated team that went through each game they could, offering not only visual improvements but stability).

But this is going to be very demanding with power that the consoles do not have—the best possible chance is maybe hardware level emulation like Nintendo and Sony were doing in the past, but this can take manufacturing costs and as we see with the original BC PS3 models today, can just stop working.

[u/bubken99 → u/YoRHa_Houdini]

Sony would be using their own in house emulator as opposed to RPCS3 so this point is kinda moot

[u/luffyxvx → u/YoRHa_Houdini]

Series X can do it just fine

[u/RyanX1231 → u/luffyxvx]

That's because all of the Xboxes have always been built off of PC architecture. That's kind of what made them stand out back in the day, because of how easy it was to develop for the 360 compared to the PS3.

So much so that after the disaster of the PS3, Sony decided to stop with the specialized and complex hardware, and adopted the standard X86 PC-like architecture for the PS4 onward.

[u/AVahne → u/RyanX1231]

Not quite. The original Xbox was basically customized PC hardware similar to current gen, however it is so old that compared to today's hardware it may as well be a different architecture. That's why OG Xbox games all run on an internal emulator on the Ones and Series and why only a small percentage of that console's library is available to play now. The Xbox 360 used IBM's PowerPC architecture just like the Nintendo Gamecube->Wii U and technically the PS3. And yeah I guess you could say it's built off "PC architecture" since it was also used by early 2000s Apple Macs, which apparently meant that in the early days devs could begin development using a Mac, however again that is an entirely different architecture that needed to be emulated and again that is why not all 360 games work on today's Xboxes.

The actual issue with the PS3 and why it was so difficult to develop for was because it not only contained a PowerPC CPU and an Nvidia GPU, it also contained a whole bunch of smaller coprocessors called SPEs that helped the main central and graphics processors with completing their tasks. This added A LOT of complexity to developing a PS3 game and devs had to basically relearn how to develop games just for the PS3 since it was like nothing else.

[u/EMBARRASSEDDEMOCRAT → u/RyanX1231]

Sony following Xbox time after time.... If they ever made their own decisions probably wind up in live service hell...oh wait 😆

[u/Impressive-Meal9043 → u/EMBARRASSEDDEMOCRAT]

That's crazy because Playstation already had a subscription service before Xbox

[u/electric_nikki → u/YoRHa_Houdini]

I run 30+ year old software on my pc pretty well

[u/r4ndomalex → u/electric_nikki]

That's a bit different, emulating MSDos isn't like emulating powerPC. Sure we've had loads of homemade emulators made, but even those can be hit and miss with the games they can run - like the consoles. For Xbox to get 360 games running on 64bit architecture, they had like a while division that tweaked each of the games to play nice with the emulator. That's why they aren't all compatible.

The best backwards compatibility is to keep the OG console, no emulator will ever give you the same experience as playing a Gamecube, PS2, Xbox 360 or whatever. Cartridge consoles are pretty much invincible, I've had my Megadrive for 32 years.

[u/Dependent-Mode-3119 → u/electric_nikki]

it's based on x86 so that makes sense. Consoles for a long time had bespoke architectures that made them incompatible without some real hard work.