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Sony's PlayStation 5 is an incredible console, but for those who believe it doesn't have enough games, Sony has touted "backward compatibility" with the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 3. Not every game will work, but Sony claims the vast majority of PS4 games will work on the PS5, at least. When it comes to the PS3 though, things are different, even though they shouldn't be.
To put things into perspective, emulation projects like have come leaps and bounds in terms of emulating the PlayStation 3, especially given its unusual architecture. It used an IBM Cell processor, a processor that Valve's Gabe Newell once famously said was a "waste of everyone's time." It was , but the PS3's hardware was exceptionally different from what was in the Xbox 360 at the time, and arguably, different from what had been in basically any other computing hardware before it. With its central Power Processing Element (PPE) and seven Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) (technically eight, though one was disabled on the PS3 for improved yield), it proved hard to develop for and even harder to emulate. This has been cited as what makes it impossible to run PlayStation 3 games on the PlayStation 5.
However, YouTuber Lowest Logan demonstrated that Sony's "solution" of cloud gaming (which requires a monthly subscription) isn't the only solution the company had to go with. As it turns out, the PlayStation 5 is more than capable of emulating quite a lot of those PlayStation 3 games.
he AMD BC-250 is a cryptocurrency mining card, but that's not all there is to it. It packs silicon extremely similar to the PlayStation 5 alongside 16GB of RAM, except there are two CPU cores stripped out and 12 fewer GPU processing cores. This is because the card is theorized to be made from silicon that failed to meet the requirements to go into a PlayStation 5. When silicon is produced, the success rate in production is referred to as the "yield", but even those that fail can sometimes be stripped down and repurposed into something else. This is common practice across the silicon industry, with companies like Intel and Qualcomm doing the same thing.
The downside is that these cards aren't really made to be used as general-purpose devices, so getting anything to run on it proved difficult. However, a user on Reddit had managed to get one to boot Ubuntu by downgrading the Linux kernel, which Lowest Logan and a group of his friends then used to try and find out what had broken the BC-250's GPU support in newer Linux kernel versions. They managed to find what broke it, revert that change, and install a more modern version of Ubuntu on it to use it as a normal computer.
Keep in mind that this machine is really not that powerful, and using it as a PC isn't recommended. The CPU itself is roughly as powerful as an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X and the GPU was said to score around an AMD Radeon RX 480 in benchmarks. Keep in mind though that games for the PlayStation 5 are made for the console in a way that they can utilize the hardware to its full capabilities, rather than being built for general-purpose computing like regular PC games. However, the performance that it was capable of was surprising when emulating PlayStation 3 games, with very few problems overall.
Given that RPCS3 is a community-made project that emulates titles (and is in no way perfect), it's honestly astonishing how much it was capable of. Lowest Logan could play Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, LittleBigPlanet, and Watch Dogs, though even Watch Dogs ran poorly on the PlayStation 3. Gran Turismo experienced some graphical problems and LittleBigPlanet ran pretty much perfectly. It's not to say that all PlayStation 3 games can run on the PlayStation 5, but it's clear that if Sony wanted to, there are plenty of games that absolutely could be played on it.
The proof of this is that RPCS3 is not an official project. It doesn't run perfectly even on high-end PCs, and it's the result of years of reverse engineering a console that had a strange architecture at the time, and still arguably does. Sony has infinitely more resources and time to put into running PlayStation 3 games if it wanted to on its newest consoles, it just chooses not to. Graphical problems like Gran Turismo experienced are typically caused either by drivers or by an unfinished graphics implementation, rather than a performance-related problem.
Plus, when it comes to performance, keep in mind that the BC-250 actually has fewer CPU and GPU cores than an official PlayStation 5 does. That means it's actually underpowered comparatively, so the performance problems experienced in games like Watch Dogs might actually be alleviated by a combination of better optimization in emulation and by the additional computational power that's offered.
Given that Sony charges a monthly fee for people to play PlayStation 3 games on a PlayStation 5 (and uses cloud streaming to do it), it's hard to make an argument saying that there's any technical limitation preventing it from happening. The company could clearly emulate at least some of its PlayStation 3 titles on the PlayStation 5 if it wanted to, it just chooses not to. Funnily enough though, the BC-250 that can be found for less than $100 on some online marketplaces.
To put things into perspective, emulation projects like have come leaps and bounds in terms of emulating the PlayStation 3, especially given its unusual architecture. It used an IBM Cell processor, a processor that Valve's Gabe Newell once famously said was a "waste of everyone's time." It was , but the PS3's hardware was exceptionally different from what was in the Xbox 360 at the time, and arguably, different from what had been in basically any other computing hardware before it. With its central Power Processing Element (PPE) and seven Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) (technically eight, though one was disabled on the PS3 for improved yield), it proved hard to develop for and even harder to emulate. This has been cited as what makes it impossible to run PlayStation 3 games on the PlayStation 5.
However, YouTuber Lowest Logan demonstrated that Sony's "solution" of cloud gaming (which requires a monthly subscription) isn't the only solution the company had to go with. As it turns out, the PlayStation 5 is more than capable of emulating quite a lot of those PlayStation 3 games.
You can buy hardware very similar to a PlayStation 5, but there's a catch
It's not meant for anything aside from mining, reallyhe AMD BC-250 is a cryptocurrency mining card, but that's not all there is to it. It packs silicon extremely similar to the PlayStation 5 alongside 16GB of RAM, except there are two CPU cores stripped out and 12 fewer GPU processing cores. This is because the card is theorized to be made from silicon that failed to meet the requirements to go into a PlayStation 5. When silicon is produced, the success rate in production is referred to as the "yield", but even those that fail can sometimes be stripped down and repurposed into something else. This is common practice across the silicon industry, with companies like Intel and Qualcomm doing the same thing.
The downside is that these cards aren't really made to be used as general-purpose devices, so getting anything to run on it proved difficult. However, a user on Reddit had managed to get one to boot Ubuntu by downgrading the Linux kernel, which Lowest Logan and a group of his friends then used to try and find out what had broken the BC-250's GPU support in newer Linux kernel versions. They managed to find what broke it, revert that change, and install a more modern version of Ubuntu on it to use it as a normal computer.
Keep in mind that this machine is really not that powerful, and using it as a PC isn't recommended. The CPU itself is roughly as powerful as an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X and the GPU was said to score around an AMD Radeon RX 480 in benchmarks. Keep in mind though that games for the PlayStation 5 are made for the console in a way that they can utilize the hardware to its full capabilities, rather than being built for general-purpose computing like regular PC games. However, the performance that it was capable of was surprising when emulating PlayStation 3 games, with very few problems overall.
Given that RPCS3 is a community-made project that emulates titles (and is in no way perfect), it's honestly astonishing how much it was capable of. Lowest Logan could play Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, LittleBigPlanet, and Watch Dogs, though even Watch Dogs ran poorly on the PlayStation 3. Gran Turismo experienced some graphical problems and LittleBigPlanet ran pretty much perfectly. It's not to say that all PlayStation 3 games can run on the PlayStation 5, but it's clear that if Sony wanted to, there are plenty of games that absolutely could be played on it.
The proof of this is that RPCS3 is not an official project. It doesn't run perfectly even on high-end PCs, and it's the result of years of reverse engineering a console that had a strange architecture at the time, and still arguably does. Sony has infinitely more resources and time to put into running PlayStation 3 games if it wanted to on its newest consoles, it just chooses not to. Graphical problems like Gran Turismo experienced are typically caused either by drivers or by an unfinished graphics implementation, rather than a performance-related problem.
Plus, when it comes to performance, keep in mind that the BC-250 actually has fewer CPU and GPU cores than an official PlayStation 5 does. That means it's actually underpowered comparatively, so the performance problems experienced in games like Watch Dogs might actually be alleviated by a combination of better optimization in emulation and by the additional computational power that's offered.
Given that Sony charges a monthly fee for people to play PlayStation 3 games on a PlayStation 5 (and uses cloud streaming to do it), it's hard to make an argument saying that there's any technical limitation preventing it from happening. The company could clearly emulate at least some of its PlayStation 3 titles on the PlayStation 5 if it wanted to, it just chooses not to. Funnily enough though, the BC-250 that can be found for less than $100 on some online marketplaces.
