One thing I detest about PlayStation 4 is the fact you cannot play titles released on earlier consoles. Many gamers, including myself, feel Sony missed a big opportunity here and is actually paying the price for that with the growing popularity of the Xbox One. But it appears things will be different with PlayStation 5.
This news comes by way of rumor mills, which began churning out speculations after a patent filed by Sony apparently got leaked. According to the reported patent filing, Sony seems to be indicating it is going for backwards compatibility that will make the console play all the retro games through emulation on the PS5.
With backwards compatibility the PS5 will give Xbox One a run for its money and even secure its market that the Microsoft-backed console has been eating into since its adopted backwards compatibility.
As per the reported leaked patent filing, the PS5 is designed by the same lead architect – Mark Cerny – who also designed the PS4. Theoretically, PS5 will run software from legacy devices; PS4, PS3, PS1, and PS1.
The backwards compatibility has been made possible by tricking the legacy software into thinking it is running on an original device. Something experts refer to as “processor ID spoofing.” PS5 will achieve that by mimicking the behavior of older hardware, and by doing so allow the legacy software to cooperate with the newer hardware.
Experts have identified the PS3 architecture as being particularly tricky to work with and it has been said to be the reason why Sony failed to roll out backwards compatibility with PS4. Apparently, PS4 was meant to have that feature, but due to the tricky nature of the PS3 architecture, Sony stalled on this plan.
Although the reported patent filing does not specify it is for PS5, there is a Reddit thread citing various sources speculating on the patent application. Virtually all the speculators are convinced the backwards compatibility in the filing by Sony is meant for PS5.
At this point, we might want to proceed with caution. Just because a company files for a patent, does not mean it will come to fruition. Patents are nothing more than work-in-progress, and sometimes that work never comes to completion.
That aside, from the rumors doing round, we think the PS5 will retail at about $500 and will be powered by the 8-core Ryzen CPU and a custom GPU built on AMD’s Navi architecture.
