PS5 Hardware Hack Gives You PS3 Backwards Compatibility, Roll Up Your Sleeves

The PlayStation 5 is one of the best games consoles you can get if you’re a fan of modern gaming, but it’s a little iffy when it comes to playing retro titles.

The PS5 is already capable of playing thousands of games released across this generation and last generation, but it gets complicated if you try to go further back.

Certain PS1 and PS2 games are available on the PlayStation Store or via PlayStation Plus, but there are thousands of games that simply aren’t available on the system.

And when it comes to playing PS3 games, it’s even more complicated. Since the PS3 had some rather dodgy internal hardware, largely due to its IBM Cell Processor which made the console pretty difficult to develop for, PS3 backwards compatibility has also been pretty difficult to emulate on PS4 and PS5.

Sony’s solution to this is to feature PS3 games on PlayStation Plus Premium via streaming, allowing you to stream these games from hardware at Sony’s datacentre servers which are more closely aligned with the PS3’s architecture.

However, it turns out that PlayStation 5 is actually more than capable of emulating PS3 games natively, reducing the need for game streaming to be the only way you can play these games on a modern console.

PlayStation 3 Native Emulation May Be Possible On PS5 After All

As reported by XDA Developers, one person going by the name of Lowest Logan was able to use a cryptocurrency mining card with similar power to a PS5 to get it running Ubuntu.

While this isn’t meant to be used as a general purpose computer, the user was reportedly able to get it running RPCS3, an emulator for the PlayStation 3. And even better, there doesn’t seem to be many issues with the emulator.

As Lowest Logan demonstrates, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, LittleBigPlanet, and Watch Dogs were playable on this hardware with only a few issues, such as minor graphical glitches in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and poor performance in Watch Dogs.

LittleBigPlanet, however, runs perfectly, matching the original game on PS3 as far as visuals and performance goes.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all PS3 games will run on a PS5. However, if fans can get some of them running on the console, there’s clear evidence that Sony with all its resources could also achieve native PS3 emulation for certain games on the PlayStation 5.