Why is Microsoft so far ahead of Sony with Back Compat?

[Cyan]

My views on BC changed with Sony. Initially I thought it was really important, especially day one to help bridge the gap in games available. However, like Sony suggest from its data, BC was rarely used - it ends up being a ‘nice to have’ feature that minimal people really ‘need’.

Then we come to next gen, suddenly BC is really important because of the ecosystem and many games now are much longer and even infinite. People will want to take their games with them.

MS have had more reasons to ply the BC functionality. They have needed to regain trust after the ‘always online’ etc fiasco and they also wanted to give more VFM as the console lacked in power and exclusives. (IMHO)

So that’s probably why MS are so far ahead and Sony behind, as well as the technical reasons given.

BC is very important, specially in the beginning of a generation, you have all your games to play, that's something which works better on PC 'cos the game you played at 480p one nice day of the past, can be played at 1440p, 4k nowadays without the GPU even batting an eyelid.

Something that Sony gotta do, aside from BC, is allowing users to buy only a copy of game, where Xbox is shining and it's a policy that CD Projekt supports.

Play Anywhere, crossplay, should be universal, there would be a lot of more games sold. My best friend has some games which I'd buy on PC to play with him, but he owns a Xbox and I dont -well, technically yes, I have one, but takes dust since 2015-.

Since I had my first console -Xbox 2004- til 2015 I could play with him the same games, nowadays we look for crossplay games.

 

[see colon]

Sony didn’t feel the need to push BC because their past solutions was the console equivalent of maintaining VHS hardware on each new gen of media players. The cost of BC makes little sense when limited to the scope of allowing people to carry their old physical libraries forward. It makes a ton of sense as a library thats pulled forward to be accessible to swathes of users that find value in playing older titles that they haven’t before played.

Sony's physical media only consoles (PS1 and PS2) were the only ones that had any sort of universal BC. As soon as digital distribution was a viable platform, it was removed from PS3 and not included with PS4. I'm not implying a causal relationship here, just that this is the way it worked out for them.

 

[invictis]

There is a good interview with a MS guy who was running Xboxs BC division, and he said by far the biggest issue with getting games on the BC list was the legals like licencing.
He gave one example of a sound track on a game where the performer had died, and no one knew who owned the copyright of that particular music. Also car licencing agreements change between companies and they no longer had the licence so couldn't redo the game.
Some companies who published the games or developed them had gone bust and didnt exist anymore, and so they couldn't do anything with those games either.

 

[Inuhanyou]

There are tons of roadblocks for sony as have been stated in the thread, the main conclusion being that emulating their legacy hardware is just not worth the effort for them. If it was easy and cost efficient they would have done it already with ps4.

With ps4s standardized hw its easier than ever to carry forward the library and its still not easy for them going into ps5. You can call it lack of foresight or just sony acting in the moment in the past regarding console development.

But sony now relying heavily on psn, live services and the like see ps4 bc as a huge priority and thats mainly what is neccesary to continue their momentum. As long as they have that they know theyll be fine.

 

[orangpelupa]

i just hope PS4 games running on PS5 will get auto upgrades. like faster loading, more stable framerate. Heck, maybe even a higher rendering resolution like Xbox One X BC of older gen consoles

 

[zed]

. If it was easy and cost efficient they would have done it already with ps4.

Remember the ps3 cpu has more flops than the cpu in the ps4, so basically running any decent ps3 game on the ps4 is impossible software wise

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes, because that is what Microsoft said.

I don't think they have. They've explained some games don't make it because of licensing and others don't make it because the IP owner can't be identified, but I don't think they've said all outstanding titles our outstanding because of these issues. I think it far more logical that most, which have no brand tie ins, product placement, or licensed soundtracks, haven't been processed for BC because it's deemed a poor investment.

It costs time and effort to check each game for compatibility:

"Basically, we have a VGPU - or an Xbox 360 GPU that we've recompiled into x86 - and we run the entire 360 OS stack," explains Bill Stillwell, Xbox Platform Lead. "We take each game, we recompile it so that it runs, but basically we're running it still in a 360, and the team goes through the game with multiple passes."
...
It proved to be the catalyst that saw Microsoft revisit its testing procedures, leading to existing back-compat titles being revamped with improved performance.
​

Here we see ongoing effort to improve BC and past titles getting performance improvements as a result. And Phil Spencer explaining the process:

"[It's a long process] especially when you're working with third-party games," explained Spencer in an interview with Pocket-Lint.
"If you put out something and it's not running well, it will reflect negatively on the publisher. So we want to get approval from the third-parties before we release them."
"You also have to make sure it runs well in backwards compatibility mode. We have one of our testing team run through every level of the game, just to make sure that there is nothing not working exactly the way we expect."
​

Clearly not every game is highly valued and worth the effort of 'porting'. MS say they focussed on the titles people wanted based on feedback:

During that time, the Backward Compatibility catalog we built directly from fan feedback has grown to over 600 titles including entire iconic franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War, and Mass Effect.​

So they likely prioritised their BC efforts on the most important titles (you'll see a large proportion of the most popular XB360 titles in the XB360 compatible titles list) and shared other titles that found also run with that priority work in place. I doubt they specifically worked to get Cabela's Alaskan Adventure or Bound By Flame working because they were deemed valuable or being demanded by XBox fans.

MS have gone on to say thousands of BC titles will work on Xbox One X:

That’s why we’re taking our work a step further and announced this week that thousands of games from all four generations will be playable on Project Scarlett.​

If they can get more games onto XBox Series X, what's the difference? I presume the emulation is better. With more horsepower, perhaps they can brute-force 360 emulation and not have to worry about per-title testing and emulation tweaking, removing that overhead.

Occam's Razor

That doesn't mean one can choose to ignore info to simplify the problem down to a solution one likes.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Remember the ps3 cpu has more flops than the cpu in the ps4, so basically running any decent ps3 game on the ps4 is impossible software wise

It's not as simple as that. IPC on PS3 could be terrible in some workloads. Here's RPCS3. Most of these are running on monster CPUs but some at the end are running on a 4 core i5 6600.

That's not to say PS4's Jag's could emulate Cell, but it's not impossible to emulate Cell if your CPU doesn't have more flops. This proves nicely that it's never about peak flops but utilisation and work done.

 

[zed]

Most of these are running on monster CPUs but some at the end are running on a 4 core i5 6600.

Mate you may think the 6600 is weak, but it’s more than twice as powerful as the cpu in the ps4.
There’s no way the cpu in the ps4 can emulate cell and matain the same frame rate in games

 

[PSman1700]

Mate you may think the 6600 is weak, but it’s more than twice as powerful as the cpu in the ps4.
There’s no way the cpu in the ps4 can emulate cell and matain the same frame rate in games

i5 6600 is nowhere near a monster, it's just that the jaguar is comparable to a 2006 mid range quad core offering Q6600.
Problem is different architectures, Cell is too different to X86 and therefore it requires brute force to emulate.

 

[TeamGhobad]

They have to be. Their games can't compete with Sony so they emphasis all the extras.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I hope you meant the 8x Jag cores are equal to a Core 2 Quad. Jaguar isn't equal to Core 2 architecture by a longshot (not that it was meant to be).

Big vector performance deficit is what really holds back software PS3 emulation on PS4. It's not the same case for 360 games on Xbox One but there MS is probably getting away with mapping individual Xenon threads to there own cores as to mitigate the low vector performance increase of 8x Jag vs Xenon. I wonder how well 360 games that use single threads per Xenon core run in BC and if they're constantly pinging the VMX unit at all.

 

[Inuhanyou]

i just hope PS4 games running on PS5 will get auto upgrades. like faster loading, more stable framerate. Heck, maybe even a higher rendering resolution like Xbox One X BC of older gen consoles

It depends on what your looking for. Devs will likely have the option to go back and use pro style upgrades on their old code so that from 4k60fps bloodborne patch might be possible if people beg hard enough.

On the other hand, out of the box i expect any game with a pro mode will run in that mode and any game without a pro mode will run as is.

I dont think the base ps4 and pro options will be a toggle but i do think that games will run better by default regardless...but since devs will be the ones to update their games, the hw will primarily be used out of the box for maximizing games with dynamic res, unlocked fps or games that have poor performance in general on ps4 hardware.

So yes, likely inferior to MSs solution. But it gets the job done and is still far better than any previous sony attempted bc solution in its expanse and treatment of previous gen titles.

 

[PSman1700]

They have to be. Their games can't compete with Sony so they emphasis all the extras.

That's a wild guess as we don't have much if any info what to expect, talking about next generation. Yes, what we know is that PS5 gets Godfall and XSX HellBlade 2. Both are console-exclusive.

I hope you meant the 8x Jag cores are equal to a Core 2 Quad. Jaguar isn't equal to Core 2 architecture by a longshot (not that it was meant to be).

Big vector performance deficit is what really holds back software PS3 emulation on PS4. It's not the same case for 360 games on Xbox One but there MS is probably getting away with mapping individual Xenon threads to there own cores as to mitigate the low vector performance increase of 8x Jag vs Xenon. I wonder how well 360 games that use single threads per Xenon core run in BC and if they're constantly pinging the VMX unit at all.

Yes thats what i ment, DF made that comparison, jaguar as in base consoles equals roughly Q6600. They probably favor different scenarios in other tests but, thats about where the perf lies. To think, the Q6600 launched somewhat before the PS3.

Core 2 Quad should be faster per core, a 8 core c2q, if it existed would be much faster.
Btw, i remember the Q6600 being a nice overclocker, one could get that cpu close to 3ghz no problems.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Considering your convo, the zen 2 3+ghz of the ps5 seems like an absolute seachange

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Mate you may think the 6600 is weak, but it’s more than twice as powerful as the cpu in the ps4.
There’s no way the cpu in the ps4 can emulate cell and matain the same frame rate in games

Did you stop reading when you got to the video?

That's not to say PS4's Jag's could emulate Cell, but it's not impossible to emulate Cell if your CPU doesn't have more flops.

Your argument was "less flops than Cell == impossible to emulate." The 6600 is four cores versus PS3's 7.5 (6.5 Cell SPUs and one PPE) clocked at about the same. It's much less peak performance but able to emulate it okay.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

...MS is probably getting away with mapping individual Xenon threads to there own cores as to mitigate the low vector performance increase of 8x Jag vs Xenon. I wonder how well 360 games that use single threads per Xenon core run in BC and if they're constantly pinging the VMX unit at all.

They compile it into an intermediate then ensure the game gets the values it expects: Here's DF's pretty thorough interview from December 2017.

"We take each game, we recompile it so that it runs, but basically we're running it still in a 360, and the team goes through the game with multiple passes."

"The way we talk about it offhand is that effectively we try to make sure that the game never knows that it's not running on an actual 360 console, and so whatever value the game presents, we return the value that it expects to get from the 360 hardware and we just do all that in software," Stillwell continues. "So, there's a multiple playthrough session where we have an army of over 100 testers who go through, collect thousands of hours of video data and then from there we'll get back data that lets us tune, and so the emulator gets a little bit more robust every cycle that we go through with game releases."​

There is some hardware assistance and - yes - some 'secret sauce' (Microsoft didn't want to be drawn on how the emulator supports Xbox 360's VMX128 vector units, for example),​

 

[BRiT]

Just to clarify for those not following along closely... It's not a compile in that it's not using any source files, it's more of a (re)packaging with perhaps a bit of dynamic replacement of certain bytecode patterns.

 

[goonergaz]

Something that Sony gotta do, aside from BC, is allowing users to buy only a copy of game, where Xbox is shining and it's a policy that CD Projekt supports.

That is a tad unfair, Sony gave some game upgrades (PS3 to PS4) for free as well cross buy for Some Vita games, but I do agree, games should be a one time purchase.

 

[zed]

Did you stop reading when you got to the video?

Your argument was "less flops than Cell == impossible to emulate." The 6600 is four cores versus PS3's 7.5 (6.5 Cell SPUs and one PPE) clocked at about the same. It's much less peak performance but able to emulate it okay.

Huh, I’m not talking about a 6600 emulating cell, I’m talking about ps4 cpu emulating cell, read my posts,
Like I said 6600 is a more than twice as powerful as the ps4’s cpu.
Here’s a 6600 with nvidia 970 & 16gb emulating a game that pushes the ps3, red dead redemption

Sure it works, and is emulating it somewhat but mate single digit FPS ain’t playable, you want this on the ps4? Which cpu is a lot worse, it would be a slideshow