It's More And More Likely That The PlayStation 5 Will Have Backward Compatibility!

General news News PlayStation PlayStation News 02/02/2019

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One of the major lacking functions of the PlayStation 4 was the ability to directly play PlayStation 3 games on it. The next generation might solve the problem.

The Japanese Hokanko-Alt wrote about how Sony has filed a patent at the Japanese Patent Office about how a console CPU could determine whether it runs a new (PlayStation 5, although the name officially doesn’t exist yet!) game or an older one. If the latter is the case, this CPU could fake being an older one to make the older (PlayStation 4, PS3, etc…) games able to run on the new console. Oh, and the person who has invented the patent is someone called Mark Cerny. The lead architect of the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation Vita. Do not ignore Cerny’s skills!

We have heard from another source as well that the next-gen PlayStation will „definitely” have backward compatibility. Over several tweets, John Linneman, a DigitalFoundry editor, has explained why he believes Sony will implement supporting older PlayStation games: „Most of their consoles have backwards compatibility and the market has changed since 2013. It was impossible last gen. Now it’ll be simple to implement in comparison. Launching at $399 was key to PS4’s initial victory. Including Cell and an Nvidia GPU in there would be insanely expensive. It proved overly expensive to include PS2 components in PS3 hence it was removed. Would be worse with Cell which is a huge chip.

[The PlayStation 5] will absolutely have [backward compatibility]. Zero question! It’s become a key selling point once again. PlayStation 3 BC was never going to happen but x86 PlayStation 4 will be a piece of cake! Why do you think they went x86? To avoid including two sets of chips as they did on PS3. PS3 compatibility on PS4 was never going to happen. The PS4 simply lacks the hardware to pull it off. The Jaguar isn’t emulating a Cell and they didn’t have the foresight to build include hardware designed to speed things up. Again, there’s a reason they went x86.”

Promising words. Let’s hope the PlayStation 5 (or whatever its name will be…) will allow us to run our older games on it, too…

Source: DualShockers, WCCFTech

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Angyal Anikó

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