When I got the XSX recently, it was so I can play Starfield when it comes out. That was basically the only reason. I did not realize the extensive backwards compatibility that this thing has. But since getting it, I’ve been playing FF13 trilogy, Fable games, Dragon Age series, Lost Odyssey, etc. Basically all games of note going all the way back to the OG Xbox will play on the latest console. Either with the original disc, or you can even purchase them online.
The point of my post is I think it’s a real travesty that PlayStation doesn’t do this. I don’t understand it. First of all, you cannot buy most PS1-PS3 games on the digital store. You can’t use the discs. The main way to get access to these games is through the top tier of PS+. But the selection is quite limited, and PS3 games in particular are streaming only.
With the selection, I want to point out that you can’t even play most of the Killzone series on PS+. This is a first party title. There is absolutely no reason that Killzone shouldn’t be available. Killzone 1 isn’t even on there. A PS2 title that is not graphically demanding.
As for the streaming of PS3 games, maybe this was justifiable back on the PS4 because the PS3 has a unique architecture that can be difficult to emulate without performance drops. But with the capabilities of the PS5, it’s not credible to claim that it can’t emulate a PS3. It certainly could, if Sony wanted to assign resources to make an emulator.
I am not a fanboy of one or the other, and I probably still play more on the PS5 than my Xbox, but I think Microsoft should market their backwards compatibility superiority a lot more than they currently do.
Sony changed their CPU architecture every time until PS4/5. The only reason some PS3s could play PS2 games is because they had also had PS2 hardware in them. Xbox has been x86 the whole time.
The 360 is IBM power pc based.
The simple answer is that microsoft is a far more advanced company in terms of programming an OS, the gap shows when you compare console securities, where virtually every nintendo or sony device had software vulnerabilities, while microsoft consoles tended to need to be hardmodded
As someone who programmed drivers for nt, it’s not, the reason it’s easier is because they started later.
Xbox is a mature x86 windows platform, vs ps1 which is an embedded mips system.
They started with their windows directx stack and just kept with it, while ps did a random walk all over the place.
Msft also had really boring hardware, like, they started with a crappy pc, then made a crappy ppc pc, then went back to a crappy pc. The software was simplistic, while Sony made really interesting hardware designs, that turned out to be hard to program, till the ps4 when they just gave up.
Msft traditionally isn’t very good at operating systems, they’ve just had infinite resources and infinite monkeys for 40+ years, and they’ve been stubborn enough to make it work somehow.
I would argue they had to give it up to get the indie scene onboard as I heard many nightmare stories for indies from PS3 era. Was it worth it? I’m sure contributed a great deal to the success of PS4 but it made the PS into just a more affordable gaming PC.
It doesnt say anything about modern consoles though. Although its dofferent at the start, their modern consoles are still effectively full of exploits. Hell VERY recently, “backup” PS4 titles are running on the PS5. Security is the main reason why BOTH the PS5 and the Nintendo Switch do not have easily accessible web browsers while Microsoft can.
I heard that the Xbox is basically like a PC (since Microsoft is so adept at this), so backwards compatibility is natural. But what you said about x86 architecture is interesting.
The original Xbox, Xbox One, and S/X are all basically x86 PCs, but the 360 was basically a Power Mac. Microsoft was literally using PowerMac G5 towers as early development kits for the 360.
Supporting 360 games is pretty time consuming and requires emulation. MS has been slowly chipping away at it for years.
The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft’s whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.
The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft’s core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn’t necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).
Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin’s “Übershaders” - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One’s CPU design, similarly to how Apple’s M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.
Microsoft’s APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.
The PowerPC cores aren’t the problem, emulating that is pretty straightforward. It’s the many SPUs that present a huge headache to emulate in a performant manner.
And yeah, MS building everything on Windows and DirectX also makes things considerably easier.
Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I’m aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you’re absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.
Luckily, I think most games either didn’t do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.
This is part of the reason why I haven’t thought of buying a console since the PS3. There are a lot of games that were made for the ps2/1 that I really loved and I can probably never play them again because PlayStations lack that feature. They have effectively been erased, which is really sad.
I sold my PS3 a long time ago, and I’ve been using Steam on my PC since then. Now I won’t have to worry about losing access to titles I bought just because they’re locked to certain hardware that will eventually not be made any more.
I wish that was true, there are so many games I would go back and play again. PS3 was a technical marvel for it’s time, however using it was so complicated that we only got to see it’s true potential by the end of it’s lifecycle with games like TLOU. So just speaking of raw power, PS5 could %100 not emulate PS3 games flawlessly as we barely have PS3 emulation on PCs. Technical part aside, it just doesn’t make business sense for Sony to invest in it. You also have to keep in mind if Sony offers PS3 emulation, it can’t stutter or crash on some games. it needs to be a commercial grade product which is not even guaranteed with PS2 or NES emulation on PC
I’ve played lot of games on the PC without issue like lollipop chainsaw, asura’s wrath, drakengard 3, and shadows of the damned without issue at 4k/60. Was really surprising to me, but rpcs3 has made great strides and if a game has been marked playable it’s been a fantastic experience. And that’s with someone unaffiliated with Sony making it possible. Seeing what Xbox accomplished with Xbox One when it came to 360 compatability it wouldn’t surprise me if Sony did better than what RPCS3 did.
There’s some notable attention given the games that don’t emulate well like MGS4 and red dead with it coming across as buggy, but lot of other titles do run really well as if they were official remastered ports.
There are rumors of the Switch getting a successor next year. My biggest wish is for it to be compatible with the current games, included digital purchases. Honestly, if I can import my digital library and saves I’m already sold on a switch successor
Xbox’s Backwards Compatibility is definitely a big deal; but as someone who loves old games as a concept and has never thrown out a console, it’s not as big a selling point as you would think/ hope.
I personally wanted to try some of the PS2/PS3 only games and didn’t have a PS3, so I bought one used a while back. I probably only logged maybe 10 hours in it before getting completely side tracked by my backlog of modern games. And while I know that’s anecdotal evidence, it really seems like the allure of classic games might not be enough of a selling point.
This is something I think Xbox had the right idea about. While BC is very useful in concept, there aren’t so many classic games that would draw people away from modern games; so you only have to support those few games.
With that in mind, I think Sony could offer BC for their relevant PS2/ PS3 exclusives since they would only need to guarantee emulator performance for a much smaller number of games. I don’t think it’s likely for Sony to do this until they are no longer the dominant console, though, as they can make more money selling their PS3 subscription service.
From a game presentation standpoint, BC is a huge issue and I would personally love to see it happen for the PS5 (and I’d like to see it expanded to all games for the Xbox as well); but I doubt there would be much return on investment for developing the BC features, and that’s the only motivation for corporations.
You’re absolutely right. However I will add to your initial point. If I could have paid an extra $100 - $150 (for the hardware) in order to have PS1-PS3 games play on my PS5, I would have just so I could have it as an option. Bonus points if the entire PS3 digital library (especially the PS1 classics) were still available.
Not the original commenter, but I did pay the extra $100-150 for the PS3 for backwards compatibility. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have. I played maybe like 3 PS2 games on it. I was far more interested in then current-gen games. I sorta got swept up in the hype of BC back in the day, especially when Sony stopped production of BC PS3s. I literally ran out and got one before they all disappeared; I still have it.
Looking back, the option wasn’t worth it. But we’re different people, different consumers. Our needs and wants differ.
