Can MS & Sony just simply make next gen fully BC?

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Well Sony hasn't attempted to make a PS3 emulator, but I'm not arguing its impossible to make that happen on PS4. The consensus has been the PS4 CPU just doesn't have the power needed. The PS3 emulator on PC requires a powerful CPU to operate at full speed but that's just an example that exist right now.

If it's a question of power... Remember that Microsoft isn't actually doing pure emulation in it's backwards compatibility efforts.
So the Emulation overhead isn't even a factor. - They aren't doing Emulation-PC-Style, consoles certainly do not have the horsepower for that.

And I will quote you on the last bit... Because now you are just contradicting your own statements:

Mr Puggsly said:

I think you're comparing the PC emulators, which isn't a fair comparison because that isn't equal optimization.

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Mr Puggsly said:

I watched the DF video discussing how Xbox 360 BC works and he says the hardware is handling some functions outside of emulation. Maybe going that route helps with some of the overhead of emulation but the X1 hardware itself is still doing heavy lifting on emulation and why X1X gets better results.

Correct. Microsoft has baked in some hardware support for the Xbox 360 (Mostly just texture format stuffs) into the Xbox One's SoC which can lend a hand to backwards compatibility, but it's not entirely necessary.

But what Microsoft is doing is... Leveraging their Multi-OS approach by using virtualization so that they can run the Xbox 360/Original Xbox's Operating Systems alongside the Xbox One's Operating Systems. - That cuts a massive chunk of the Emulation overhead.

Microsoft is then also abstracting as much as it can... And possibly even using a form of binary translation.

And we know that they are repackaging their games, hence the enforced download of all Backwards Compatible games... Which is in stark contrast to the XBox 360's Backwards compatibility scheme as you would only download a tiny profile that is only a couple megabytes on that console to plug into the Emulator.

Meaning the CPU is pretty irrelevant, the Jaguar CPU's are vastly superior to that of Cell and Xenon anyway... Especially once you start to leverage some of the newer instructions. - And like I eluded to prior, the more Multi-threaded a game is, the better it is to Emulate... As no longer does timing and keeping everything in sync is as important.

At the end of the day though... Before Microsoft launched their Xbox One backwards compatibility scheme, I often argued it was entirely possible to emulate the Xbox 360 on the Xbox One... They just couldn't take a brute force approach... And it turned out I was correct. - And I argue the same reasoning for the Playstation 3.

Well DF didn't exactly clarify how much of the burden is being handled by hardware. It was sound, some graphical aspects, etc. Its possible the X1 could run 360 games entirely through emulation, but they found other ways use to use hardware it seems. And again, its still the CPU and GPU doing the heavy lifting for X1's BC.

I was referring to you talking about the emulators on PC for 360 and PS3. The optimization isn't great on either but even with further optimization they will always require higher end CPUs for a locked 30 or 60 fps, depending on the game. By today's standards at least.

Well it seems we're on the same page really, for the most part. Its hard to say what a brute force approach on X1 BC would look like as they opted to do a few things to make that not entirely necessary. I can't help but wonder if those baked in features help with easier and more accurate emulation versus really lowered the overhead.

In the end I think we came to the same conclusion that the PS4 simply doesn't have the power to emulate PS3 properly, full speed, or whatever. Maybe if there were some baked in features that would help, but I still think emulating the Cell is more resource intensive than the 360 CPU. When you look at the PC emulators though, the PS3 emulator is much better optimized.

I'm hoping we see a notable PS3 emulator in the PS5. It would probably be handled like the PS2 emulator on PS4 though, you just buy games off the store. But if it can run those PS3 games with improved performance and 4K, that would still be great. That would allow Sony to put many PS3 games on a some sort of Game Pass clone.