The base PlayStation 5 is more than capable of emulating PlayStation 3 games at a hardware level, a new test confirms.
A new video shared by Lowest Logan on YouTube showcases a test conducted using an AMD BC-250, a mining card that features the PlayStation 5 silicon, most likely created by repurposing chips that did not meet the full specifications required by the console, complete with 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM. The card, however, has some limitations over the actual PS5 hardware, as two CPU cores have been disabled, and only 24 compute units are available over the total number of 32 units.
To get the AMD BC-250 to run games like the PlayStation 5 hardware it is based on, Lowest Logan had to overcome plenty of challenges, as both Windows and Linux distros did not run properly. After some experimenting, however, the YouTuber managed to get everything up and running and has tested some PlayStation 3 games via the excellent RPCS3 emulator, proving the claims that PS3 emulation is too computationally heavy for the PS5 are false. Both Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Little Big Planet ran well at both native and higher resolution, keeping steady framerates even with some of the hardware limitations over the actual PS5, including memory limitations, as the GPU driver only saw a single memory clock state for the GPU, 450 Mhz, which put it on the same level of an RX 480 GPU, a much weaker card than the RX 6700 GPU the PS5 GPU is close to. So, even with a lot of performance left on the table, the current generation console is more than capable of running PlayStation 3 games.
As of now, select PlayStation 3 games are available on PlayStation 5, but only via game streaming, and a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription is required to access these titles. More information on this subscription tier can be found here.
