All PS3s are backward compatible with PS2 software.

[walsufnir]

WereKitten said:

Nem said:

This is one of the reasons why i dont understand why the PS4 doesnt have backwards compatibility with the PS3. Certainly Sony has a team of programmers that can create an emulator for PS3 games... Its the way Micosoft did  with the Xbox/X360 aswell.

Easy: the PS4 has nowhere near the CPU/GPU power to correctly emulate a PS3. Game profiles are supposed to be fixes for shortcuts taken in the general emulator code, but can't close a big gap.

A very different architecture implies a substantial overhead and we're talking of seven PowerPC cores at 3.2GHz with a complicated memory access plus a customized GPU that is ancient in PC terms, but still not trivial. Look how sketchy PS2 emulation is on PCs: I doubt you can build a generally good PS3 emulator even for high-end computers.

Xbox->360 (or PS2->PS3) was a much bigger computational step, and I am actually surprised to hear that a general purpose PS2 emulator can run that well on a PS3 without substantial ad-hoc tweaks for each title.

@bolded: no, the spes are not ppc-isa, they have their own.