When they confirmed Backwards Compatibility, I'm 100% sure it was in reference to PS4 games. Not PS3, PS2, or PS1 games. Expecting them to do that is just dumb, and completely irresponsible thinking.

Just because all of PlayStation's flagship consoles were disc based, doesn't mean they'll work just fine regardless of hardware and architecture disparity/differences.

It's not like Sony has it's finger on an On/Off switch and just refuse to flip it on in the name of pure greed. 

This makes it easier to buy on day 1 then. Great stuff.

Same with me, but I was going to get all three again anyways. However moves like this help justify my purchase. 

I realize that it's undesirable having to constantly do some rearchitecting for your engine/game to use the latest technology to get optimal performance but that's the direction the entire industry is headed in which is mesh/primitive shaders ... 

Next gen consoles are guaranteed to have primitive shaders since it's going to be enabled for the Navi architecture this year on PC ... 

Primitive shaders have a brighter future towards bringing higher geometry throughput than either tessellation or more geometry engines could've ever did ... (I don't know what Microsoft was thinking at the time when they standardized tessellation since were some serious fundamental flaws with it and we should've went straight to doing primitive shaders instead but I guess we're just going to have to live with the fact that there's wasted die space in the GPUs)

Its a debate iv had for years. BC makes remastering games useless since the option to play the older games removes the need of the customer to rebuy it. All consoles should be pushing for BC. Its a shame its only BC with PS4 but if its BC with PS1/2/3 and 4 than ill buy a PS5 day one.

Don't get me wrong, I am a massive supporter of Primitive Shaders, it would resolve one of the largest fundamental bottlenecks of Graphics Core Next, Geometry... And instead shift the burden to Graphics Core Next's greatest strengths, compute.

In saying that... It's not looking good since AMD canned Primitive Shaders.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7sedpq/amd_cancels_the_driver_path_for_primitive_shaders/

So who knows if they will bring it back with Navi?

Even then Primitive Shaders won't resolve the Geometry bottlenecks of current games or even games coming out in the immediate future which will continue to rely on Tessellation or parsed high poly models.

The funny thing is games seem to often load more in the 8th gen than last gen. Even with vastly faster and more RAM, better CPUs, better GPUs and being optimized for HDDs. The load times in fighting games have suddenly become the worst they've ever been.

I don't feel running games off a HDD was done out of necessity. The PS3 was able to run games directly from a BD disc, so did the Wii U (likely BD tech). Therefore its not crazy to assume PS4 and X1 could have as well especially with their faster drives. I believe they opted for HDD primarily because that made optimization easier, faster transfer speeds and storage dropped in price significantly.

I'm not sure what they did to make Spiderman load so fast on the PS5 devkit, but I think they're misleading us on how it was done. He's giving the impression its because of the SSD on its own, but that just doesn't make sense. I believe it has more to do with the other specs of the hardware, especially RAM. I mean if basically all the textures and other assets can be stored in RAM, that's gonna eliminate much of the streaming needed from the storage. Maybe consoles using unified RAM helps simplify this process.

I'm not surprised at all that AMD canned exposing primitive shaders since the VAST majority of AAA games out there don't even do GPU compute culling so there's practically zero interest currently from developers to even implement the basics but we can't deny that there are real use cases for it ... 

I believe that bringing upon a new generation will be the panacea we need and I can guarantee you that AMD engineer have heavily implicated functional primitive shaders for Navi but why on earth would anyone need more raw geometry performance ? A Radeon VII at 2Ghz can churn out 8 billion triangles per second which can will give you well over 130 million tris per frame at 60Hz. Even when we're talking about 120Hz, that still gives you 65 million tris per frame which will still give you sub-pixel triangles at 8K resolution! 

Heck, most of the geometry performance goes into rendering the shadow maps but why would anyone need to do that when you have hardware accelerated ray tracing in the first place which are better than using shadow maps ? Geometry bottlenecks are mostly due to game developers not finding the best ways to utilize hardware like using tessellation or not doing GPU compute culling ... 

....theres a patent filed for the exact same thing though.. lol