A technical reason for why the PS5 can’t emulate PS3 games

Even before the PlayStation 5 was announced, many of us hoped it would finally give us backwards compatibility for the PS3. Given my love for Sony’s bizarre 7th gen console, that would have made it a guaranteed purchase for me. However, the company has confirmed that its upcoming hardware will not be playing those games any time soon. So what’s the technical reason, if any, behind this?

Well, Modern Vintage Gamer has finally provided us with the possible answer. Or at least the one that makes the most logical sense from coding standpoint.

For those who don’t know him, Dimitris is a developer for Nightdive Studios. He’s also a bit of a legend in the console homebrew and emulation scenes, creating many well known console emulators for the original Xbox among other systems.

In his latest video, he dissects the problems with emulating PS3 hardware. The Cell processor it uses is basically this chimera between a traditional CPU and a modern GPU. It features a single core, dual thread PowerPC processor (PPE) along with seven additional simple cores that handle parallel workloads. They’re designed to handle things like particle effects and audio processing.

Emulating the PPE is easy, but getting the SPEs to work is a major challenge. Particularly in the way they fetch and handle data. While the Cell is still a powerful processor even by today’s standards, it was always difficult to optimize code for. Programming something that can replicate its quirks in software is no small feat. Due to the way it works on a fundamental level, these are issues can’t just be solved by throwing more processing power at the problem.

The video does get a touch technical, but only a touch. It’s worth watching if you want to understand why running PS3 games on the PS5 is difficult. That’s not to say that we’ll never get reliable PS3 emulation. We’ve already had a taste of it on the PC through the RPCS3 emulator. But it’ll still be a while yet before the hurdles are sorted out. Hurdles that may be too cost prohibitive for Sony to bother dealing with.