“This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU’s memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen,” Whatcookie says.

This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called “unfriendly to emulation,” where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU. The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360.

“The CELL even surpasses the PS4’s CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance.” “The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance,” Whatcookie explains. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. In short, PS3’s CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony’s modern systems. The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn’t much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony’s latest system, with a couple of exceptions. He broke down what makes PS3 emulation particularly frustrating and sheds some light on why Sony is content with streaming PS3 games from the cloud instead. Whatcookie, who chose not to share his name, is also known for creating a 60 frames per second patch for the PS3 version of Demon’s Souls. To learn why PS3 games are so hard to bring to modern consoles, I spoke to Whatcookie, a contributor for the popular PS3 emulator RPCS3.

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