The PlayStation 5 has already been “announced” and we learned that one of Sony’s goals is to reduce loading times… we also know the device will be backward compatible with the PlayStation 4, but until now we did not know the details of how that would work and whether games would get an upgrade when running on the stronger system, as happens between Xbox 360 and Xbox One X.
The site Gamingbolt got access to the backward compatibility patent filed by Sony and shared some details about how it will work. Here it is:
“Differences in the performance of the hardware components of a new device and a legacy device can cause synchronization errors on the new device, which can cause the legacy application to crash or produce incorrect output when run on a new device architecture. Such differences in performance can arise, for example, from differences in hardware architecture between the new and legacy devices.”
Basically Sony wants to allow PlayStation 4 games to run the same way on the PlayStation 5 without the developer having to worry about changing the game’s code… the game should run without performance losses or bugs. Nothing is mentioned about graphical upgrades, but we can assume that at the very least we will have much faster loading thanks to the SSD in the new console (Mark Cerny mentioned this when testing the loading time of Marvel’s Spider-Man: in the direct comparison the PS4 loaded the game, after a fast travel, in 15 seconds and the PS5 in 0.8 seconds… yes, less than 1 second, that is, 15 times faster.
“The performance of an application on a new device can be closely related to the performance of that same application on the legacy device by adjusting the operating parameters of the new device”, the patent explains. “Examples of operating parameters include, among other things, the clock frequencies of the new device, the number of general-purpose registers (GPRs) available, instruction launch rates and the like. The application can be run repeatedly on the new system while adjusting its operating parameters to tune the application-specific performance characteristics.
“After a sufficient number of tests on the new system, it is possible to analyze how the application’s performance characteristics on the new system converge as the operating parameters change. A new set of operating parameters can be created based on the convergence analysis. This process can be repeated until the operating parameters are optimally set for the application on the new system. To optimize further, the execution of the new hardware can be adjusted to see whether the application can run faster on the new hardware without causing a crash. ”
Source: Eurogamer/Gamingbolt
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