PS3 Games Emulation on PS5 Still a Difficult Task, Experts Say

Following rumors that Sony‘s bringing “select” PS3 games natively to PS5, tech experts have said that the task at hand remains a difficult one, and fans should keep their expectations in check. Folks over at Digital Foundry reckon that some popular games will be near impossible to emulate.

PS3’s tech holds back its games from the PS5

Digital Foundry has corroborated what has been a widely accepted reason for why PS3 games can’t run natively on the PS5: the former’s complex architecture. The team says that the PS3 cell processor’s SPUs don’t work well with modern x86 processors, and games with heavy SPU usage will suffer from major performance issues.

The emulation community has aready tried and tested the above. Digital Foundry named Killzone 2 as one of the games that won’t be able to make its way to the PS5 natively.

That said, Digital Foundry thinks that there are some games that Sony might be able to emulate on the PS5. But the keyword is “some.” The team also pointed out that Sony’s existing classics library on PS4 and PS5 is already quite small, so it’s unlikely we’ll see a lot of PS3 games running natively on modern consoles.