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SJReiter said:

Hmmm. So basically the PS3 is too advanced for the PS4 to emulate, yet too technically inferior for the PS4 to be PS3 backwards compatible. How odd

No console can emulate the PS3, I'd go as far as saying not even the most high end of PC today could emulate a PS3 at full speed.
The architecture is just too exotic (read: overly complicated and a pain in the ass to use even on it's actual hardware) to properly emulate.

Not to mention that the Cell BBE cpu actually runs faster for single threaded tasks than the PS4 cpu, significantly so.

The same goes for the Xbox 360, the XBO cannot actually emulate the game code as-is off of the disk, it doesn't have the horsepower and resources to do so, which is why even with the actual disk in the drive you still need to download the game.

Simply put, they have to do some relinking/hooking trickery to the primary executable in order to sidestep the main architectural differences and reduce the computation needed for straight emulation.