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

[DonFerrari]

Mr Puggsly said:

DonFerrari said: 

If X1 which is weaker than PS4 can run X360 games that are on par with PS3 (some even performed better) then certainly if Sony wished to put the effort they would be able to do BC.

As explained by Pemalite in some threads. PC emulation of consoles need a lot of overhead and muscle because the creator of the emulator doesn't really need the internals of the HW. Sony knows it all. So if they wanted they could do BC of PS3 on PS4. The fact PS4 doesn't BC even PS1 show it have nothing to do with power. PS4 reads CD and DVD, they sell classic PS1 games and remastered PS2 games.

They wouldn't profit from free BC of PS1 and PS2 games (and considering data and PR probably most users wouldn't even use it much), but they got good revenue stream from selling these at cheap on PS Store with trophies, upped res or whatever.

Well emulation is more CPU heavy so PS4's superior RAM and CPU doesn't quite matter there. Its already been discussed in this thread that the emulation of 360 games on X1 isn't done entirely by emulation. There are actually a few things being handled natively by the X1's APU, some baked in features likely intended for BC down the road. Basically that reduces some of the overhead of emulation alone (so less CPU power needed).

The PS3 actually had a more capable CPU than the 360 and many believe it would require more CPU power to emulate the cell versus 360's CPU. Whether or not that's true, there is evidence that X1 is not using just brute force power to emulate the 360.

Sony has made (or ported) a PS2 emulator to PS4. I own numerous emulated PS2 games on PS4. Not quite sure they would skip PS3 emulation if demand is so high, probably because they can't do it?

Eitherway, its likely PS5 will have the CPU power needed to emulate PS3. Which would be great even if they don't want to add BC per se, I would buy some emulated PS3 games with improved performance and resolution. Maybe even make other graphical improvements like Xbox One X does for some games.

Yes you are mostly right. Sony can certainly make BC for PS1 to PS4 if they want. And they could have made PS1 to 3 on PS4 if they really wanted, that is the most relevant part of the discussion.