Technical experts believe that full emulation of PlayStation 3 games may only appear on PlayStation 6. Despite long-standing requests from players to add native PS3 support to PlayStation 5 instead of cloud streaming, the console's current hardware seems not powerful enough for stable emulation of the Cell architecture.
Over the weekend, Digital Foundry specialists conducted an experiment to run PlayStation 3 games on PlayStation 5 using the RPCS3 emulator and a new Linux bootloader. Tests showed that the main limitation remains the console's processor. Games that do not too actively use the complex SPU architecture of the Cell processor, such as Ridge Racer 7, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Heavenly Sword, run noticeably better than the original on PS5 — with increased resolution and more stable performance.
However, more demanding projects, including Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and God of War: Ascension, face significant performance drops. The reason is the active use of SPU blocks for open-world processing, post-processing, and anti-aliasing. Moreover, increasing the resolution practically does not affect FPS, which confirms that the bottleneck is precisely the PlayStation 5 CPU.
A similar situation is observed in Killzone 2, Killzone 3, and the MotorStorm series. In some cases, disabling SPU-dependent functions significantly improves emulation performance. According to Digital Foundry, only the Zen 6 architecture, expected in PlayStation 6, will be able to provide the necessary power for full PlayStation 3 emulation.