| Kyuu said: PS4's CPU is trash, it's barely an improvement over the 8 years olde Cell CPU. Maybe that plays a role. |
What? It's a massive improvement over Cell.
Then again, Jaguar is still horrible, but it's still much better than Cell ever was, but that's to be expected, consoles haven't taken CPU performance seriously for a very very long time.
The reason for the lack of backwards compatability though is one of hardware, the Playstation 2 is radically different than the Playstation 4 in many aspects that makes a hardware based solution simply unfeasible.
Sony tried the hardware approach with the early Playstation 3's, the extra processors required drove up costs, it would have been possible if the Playstation 4 was an architectural evolution of the Playstation 2, instead the Playstation 4 is more like a cousin of a Mid-range PC.
However, the Playstation 4 is plenty powerfull enough to offer a fully software based approach and would even be able to employ techniques to improve image quality. (I.E. Upscale to 4k, then downsample to 1080P is one option, then apply some Anti-Aliasing and texture filtering and some post-processing effects.)
The reason why it would work is one of low level hardware understanding by Sony, emulators on the PC work by making the PC "Act" like it's a Playstation 2, some calls/commands require multiple passes to perform the same function that would be done in a single pass on a console, hence why on a PC you need a massively more powerfull system to pull it off.
However, Sony is a for-profit company, they are going to be more inclined to offer a paid approach via the cloud and lock you into the platform than a free one, it's not going to be ideal, but those are the cards that were dealt.
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