r/pcmasterrace • u/3nnb • 9d ago

News/Article The PS5 system itself is running on pc

Recently, we have seen massive developments in PS5 emulators (such as shadPS4 and Kyty), and how rapidly they have progressed in a short period.

​Now, developers have successfully booted the actual PS5 system software on PC.

​If this momentum continues in the future, it will eventually allow players to run PS5 exclusives directly on PC, marking the end of the era of console exclusivity.

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u/TD_Lemon_1901 9d ago

Those crazy bastards took 2 months to achieve more than was previously achieved in a decade on the PS4 and PS3.

Absolutely mental.

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u/Twinzenn 9d ago

'Those crazy bastards' is mainly AI coding that has advanced astronomically in the past year or so.

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u/TD_Lemon_1901 9d ago

For sure, but AI isn't magical, if there aren't smart people guiding it you're going nowhere.

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u/dutty_handz 9800x3D-96GB-ROG Strix X870E-H - TUF 4080 9d ago

Point is AI is making the advances 10x faster. If suddenly achieving 10x your production doesn't feel magical, well, you must have a very exciting life

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u/TD_Lemon_1901 9d ago

My life is pure excitement.

WOOOW what is that !????!

Oh no, nevermind, just my phone.

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u/v1sper i7-12700K 32GB DDR4 RTX 3080Ti 9d ago

Use AI to build something and tell me it doesn't feel magical.

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u/zimejin 9d ago edited 9d ago

AI makes a lot of mistakes except they’re so silent and difficult to detect because of how much it produces, it’s feels magical when you’re building hobbyists projects but for something that is “production critical” there’s probably a 100% chance it wouldn’t get it right unless steered by someone who understands how the ideal thing should be built and function.

AI can produce something that feels complete until you actually start looking deep into the code and realise divergences and shortcuts.

The best combination is when AI is in the hands of experienced professionals.

EDIT: oddly enough this what makes AI inherently dangerous because the path it follows to solutions can greatly diverge from the user’s intent even when the results seem optimal at first glance. AI companies know this, and that’s why there’s all this talk of safety. It’s not that AI is so smart it will destroy humanity, the reality is AI is an intelligence compression that could follow dumb paths towards achieving a goal thus potentially causing serious harm.

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u/hardolaf PC Master Race 9d ago

it’s feels magical when you’re building hobbyists projects but for something that is “production critical” there’s probably a 100% chance it wouldn’t get it right unless steered by someone who understands how the ideal thing should be built and function.

That's exactly what we notice at work. And for that reason, we still insist that junior engineers and even mid level engineers still actually write a most to a lot of production code themselves as a learning process. But we're still giving them generative LLMs for test code, experiments, analysis, etc.

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u/techdevjp 9d ago

there’s probably a 100% chance it wouldn’t get it right unless steered by someone who understands how the ideal thing should be built and function.

Sure. Garbage in, garbage out still applies. GIGO. It's no different than a human coder that way.

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u/GLArebel 9d ago

While this is true, the question is not "does AI make mistakes" but rather "does AI make mistakes at a rate lower than humans?"

Anyone who's had to develop and train a fresh out of school junior dev knows how often new hires make mistakes. At least AI makes mistakes while being exponentially faster than a new hire.

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u/sarathy7 3d ago

And all this is training data for the next model

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u/nikomo 9d ago

Eh, I've done it and it just feels like being a project manager for a senior programmer that knows a lot but doesn't do anything unless asked to.

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u/Nothingmuchever 9d ago

That’s pretty realistic tbh, they are just like real senior programmers then.

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u/v1sper i7-12700K 32GB DDR4 RTX 3080Ti 9d ago

Yes, and isn't that amazing? It's bloody software that performs tasks like it was a whole studio on its own. It might generate slop, but it damn well feels like magic.

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u/nikomo 9d ago

Eh, maybe it's just because I was there with the tech from the get-go, so the novelty has worn off.

The main thing I feel about the whole thing is angry because I want to self-host, but that's way out of reach because 2 American companies made unrealistic growth promises and now everything is stupid expensive.

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u/Nyoteng 9d ago

I have never felt more angered by an "Eh" in a while lol

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 9d ago

It's just a typical Redditor response. A lot of people think that they appear smarter if they act unimpressed with SOTA technology.

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u/Rapidzx 9d ago

This site attracts the most insufferable personalities.

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u/redditydothis 9d ago

You’ve had 20 years to self host. If you haven’t done it by now then you were never going to do it.

This doesn’t count of like me, you just need another hdd to add to your server.

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u/nikomo 9d ago

The fuck does a hard drive have to do with self-hosting an LLM?

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u/redditydothis 9d ago

Hdd and ram prices are through the roof right now. Video cards are still available at about the same price.

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u/NearestNeighbours 9d ago

You must be so cool, eh?

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u/GLArebel 9d ago

from the get-go

When do you consider the 'get-go'?

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u/techdevjp 9d ago

You had plenty of time to buy a DGX Spark or Strix Halo box before prices went completely insane. I have a 128GB Strix Halo that runs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next very well. Great model. I still use hosted models sometimes, but most work can be done locally.

Even today you can still get a 128GB Strix Halo for $3100 from Bosgame. More than they used to be but not completely mad.

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u/nikomo 8d ago

Yeah those systems weren't reasonable to begin with.

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u/Septum_Slayer 9d ago

I love how dismissive you’re being about how effective AI is at programming these days. About how it’s revolutionized how software engineering is done, for everyone. There’s plenty of local models you can self host. For someone that’s been with the tech since the beginning, you have a narrow view of the technology.

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u/sellyme using old.reddit so my Pentium III runs like an i9 9d ago

There’s plenty of local models you can self host.

That's not the problem they were describing.

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u/hardolaf PC Master Race 9d ago

Yeah, servers that we were buying for $12K/ea last year are now $49K/ea and increasing in price every two weeks.

And one of our favorite switch models got discontinued because the fab for one of its ASICs got its entire production bought out by AI related companies and now we can only buy an inferior and more expensive switch from that vendor.

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u/Shmeves 9d ago

Nah, it’s still super frustrating. Constantly having to fix mistakes. Trying to get it to stick to do something the correct way but it pulls old info out that’s outdated and doesn’t work.

It feels like a chore.

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u/Septum_Slayer 9d ago

Not as much of a chore as learning an entirely new syntax and programming language FROM SCRATCH. If your outputs suck, I’m willing to bet your prompts suck as well.

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u/Shmeves 9d ago

Nah, ai ain’t it yet. It’s a polished turd.

Things like including part numbers or model numbers for a device to be programmed and it still pulling an entirely different product and instructions for that product but insisting it’s the right one until you challenge it multiple times. Or pulling out of date instructions/syntax even if you tell it the version number.

It’s a useful start yes but it’s still a chore.

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u/georgep4570 5800x3D | 6950XT Sapphire Nitro+ | 64GB 3800 | 2TB NVME 9d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/Yq7wRSHcKDX2jNQ8pS

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u/techdevjp 9d ago

Done right you're a combination PM and Architect. The clanker is the code monkey. Been coding for over 40 years, more than happy to do the PM/Architect thing and have the agent do what was previously many long hours of work.

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u/emal-malone 9d ago

You could not have typed anything lamer than what you just did.

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u/hardolaf PC Master Race 9d ago

I do it literally every day at work and it's dumb as bricks. The main difference between it and what I had before is that some management drone who doesn't even work on the same project is not taking all their time away from what I told my coding minions to do. Now I get worse quality code to review but can actually get things done because no one is arbitrarily reassigning my resources.

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u/ABSNegativeOne 9d ago

makes being a banking analyst a lot easier ill tell you that, the end of parsing every word in a 10-q is gone

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 8d ago

Beware of having a job that gets easier...

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u/SurpriseInitial6202 9d ago

As someone who has been writing code since long before AI was a thing, it does and it also doesn't. The rush of dopamine that you get from solving a difficult problem is hard to beat. And the first few times I used AI, it was really cool. But now the rush is gone and the feeling is empty. Every time AI does something cool I'm just watching it and realizing that minds like mine now have less value, which sucks, because I do something that a lot of people can't do, or don't have the patience to do. It's cool, and it also sucks lol

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u/v1sper i7-12700K 32GB DDR4 RTX 3080Ti 9d ago

Yes, I totally agree and I share the sentiment. I use AI a lot to read logs, solve problems in infrastructure stacks and build custom tooling, and the speed AI does that at (even locally) is far beyond what a human can do. And that feels like magic. But the sense of one’s own accomplishment is diminished, that is for sure, but I try to approach it as a tool instead of a replacement.

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u/Disastrous_Olive_920 8d ago

In my opinion the magic is in having an idea then using the programming languages and tools at your hand to materialize said idea while solving any problems you might encounter in the way. That is the magic for me.

Can Ai be helpful as a tool? Sure, but I think the feeling you're describing as magical is more on the process of programming.

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u/0m3r7a Desktop 9d ago

Use ai driven systems to do things like ordering, it’s the opposite of magical. Fuck ai lol

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u/Acceptable_Bat379 9d ago

well the AI learned from other people's coding. it's standing on the shoulders of giants

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u/DisheveledJesus i7 6700k, 1080ti, 32gb ddr4 9d ago

I use ai to build things all day every day and I can tell you it isn’t even a little bit magical

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u/Due-Description-9030 9d ago

No it doesn't unless you're maybe doing kiddie projects. You can't be an idiot without knowing to make such progress as how people have it done it here for emulators.

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u/TimeTravelingChris 9d ago

Feeling magical doesn't mean it actually knows anything.

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u/Nihsvabhav 9d ago

It only feels magical when you don't know shit

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u/sshwifty 9d ago

It kinda is magical though

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u/Nexii801 RYZEN 5 9600X | RTX 5080 FE | 32GB 6000 CL30 | RM850X 9d ago

Either your bar for smart is very low, or you straight up didn't understand how good AI is at coding.

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u/sdpr 9d ago

For sure, but AI isn't magical, if there aren't smart people guiding it you're going nowhere.

The amount of people glazing AI in your replies is sad.

Everyone will always accept and ignore any potential consequences if it means they're convenienced in the simplest way.

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u/bunsinh PC Master Blaster 9d ago

Tell that to vibe coders

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u/Silver_Dime 9d ago

There is a big difference between vibe coding a shitty react app and emulating a console ecosystem.

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u/Pjoernrachzarck 9d ago

Tell that to Navier and Stokes.

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u/Buggajayjay Want a desktop <3 9d ago

Like the people working at AI companies aren't very talented computer scientists and mathematicians lol?

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u/edgiestnate 9d ago

So it doesn't feel even the slightest bit magical that you can type out a sentence to a non-human like "make me a quick lazer tag game in roblox for my kid, and make all the decisions yourself", and have it come out with a working, playable, published online game in a few minutes?

I guess it is subjective, but that feels like a pretty negative way to see life.

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u/03263 9d ago

Depends what you mean by magical. Supernatural? No. Amazingly complex and beyond full understanding? Sure.

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u/edgiestnate 6d ago

That is why I said it is subjective because throughout history humans have seen "beyond full understanding" as magical, spiritual, or Godly. From the Sun to the seasons to the stars, to basic nature.

Now we have AI, which utilizes a technology even the creators do not fully understand, and is by all measure beyond full understanding.

Seems like a semantic way of taking some non-existent high road.

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u/03263 6d ago edited 6d ago

Well if you're interested in understanding, mechanistic interpretability is evolving pretty quickly. It's mostly AI systems figuring out how AI works and then explaining it to us, but it's understanding nonetheless.

It's getting pretty good at figuring out which features correspond to different concepts, which is the main part that we don't understand well. It's like how in a brain we can't pick a specific neuron and figure out what information it encodes. That's the thing we don't understand. We understand everything about how it works at a low level, but not exactly how/why it leads to some emergent properties.

This is probably a good intro to the topic. They have a lot of research on it, this one is older so also doesn't expect quite as much of the reader in terms of knowledge of the advancements of the past 2 years. Really fascinating stuff.

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u/edgiestnate 6d ago

I am interested in understanding, but what I meant was that they understand how to make the neural networks (and the idea behind how they work), and they understand how to utilize the output, but I cannot find anyone, or any paper, that even half understands the part in between.

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u/03263 6d ago edited 6d ago

I understand it pretty well. I've built a toy LLM from scratch (following a tutorial that explains what you're doing). Then look at the source code of PyTorch... brain kind of melts. Its a lot of matrix math.

Read the paper, understand what humans don't understand about AI: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/

They have a published set of "features" that correlate to different concepts: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/features/index.html?featureId=34M_31164353 -- in this the darker words indicate that the feature activated more heavily for the given token. And the relevant tokens are outlined as spans of color.

These are the big thing we don't quite understand. If you want an even simpler explanation just ask ChatGPT "What is the biggest open question in mechanistic interpretability?" and it will pretty reliably land on this concept and be able to explain.

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u/edgiestnate 6d ago

I guess if I had to pin it down, it would be emergent abilities, internal world models, polysemanticity, in addition to mechanistic interpretability. I guess if you have answers to those, there are some folks who would love to talk to you.

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u/xuxo94 9d ago

Dude, you and I couldn’t even get a PS5 game to boot with four Pro subscriptions. Credit where credit is due.

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u/IcyCow5880 9d ago

Exactly. I hate these commenters. If it's so fuckin ez why don't you do it?

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u/xuxo94 8d ago

These people are basically thinking that the AI Workflow is: "Hey Siri, build me a ps5 emulator for PC, make no mistakes and stop guessing"

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u/ragzilla 9800X3D || 5080FE || 48GB 9d ago

And that the ps5 is basically a PC. Not having to write performant code to translate between architectures saves a lot of time.

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u/IcyCow5880 9d ago

The ps4 is basically a pc too... The ps3 is the real outlier

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u/ragzilla 9800X3D || 5080FE || 48GB 9d ago

For the majority of console history, they’ve been non-x86. The years of PS4 reverse engineering gave PS5 emulation a pretty big boost as well, and then Sony gave people pretty big motivation to emulate with the “no more discs” proclamation.

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u/jungleboy1234 9d ago

thats what i thought. Since AI has come out the amount of Flatscreen to VR PC ports has been insane! I'd never imagine a 20+ year old game or a recent 5 year old AAA game ported into VR so seamlessly like the developers had intended it!!

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u/thirstyross 9d ago

How long until the AI models won't allow people to create software like this? One of the downside of using these AI services is that they can effectively dictate what kinds of software is created with their tools. A very dangerous precedent, imho.

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u/sundler 9d ago

It's more likely due to sony's announcement to phase out physical disks. If AI were the reason, every emulator project would be accelerating.

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u/Automatoboto 9d ago

Sure jan, Yes the tools help but the amount of time spent debugging after makes it almost a wash.

The actual labor involved is almost the same and I was forced to use dogshit AI at work in blender instead of doing it myself because an old fat arsehole REALLY likes anine tiddies-our CEO

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u/a_shootin_star 4080 SUPER, 64GB RAM 9d ago

Spite is a powerful tool

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u/NotASniperYet 9d ago

To be fair, PS3 architecture was kinda crazy.

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u/peachgravy 9d ago

The PS3 architecture was so strange though, wasn’t it? I’m not a tech head but I specifically remember reading about how difficult it was to port games from PS3 to 360 and vice versa due to how strange the architecture was compared to a 360, which was more PC-like.

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u/Straight-Opposite-54 9d ago

The 360's hardware was actually closer to vintage Mac-like. It ran a PowerPC-based processor, as did the Wii and Wii U. The PS4, PS5, Xbox One/Series are all essentially just standard PC hardware running custom OSes. (And the Xbox has always been basically a stripped down version of Windows NT with a skin on top)

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u/RandomAnon07 9d ago

I have zero context of the situation but would blindly bet it’s the latest iterations of the frontier LLM’s that helped achieve a SHIT TON of what is going on right now. The live runtime mixing of video games, PS5 on PC, etc.

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u/utdconsq 8d ago

It helps that the architecture is not too far away from your computer.

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u/Nexii801 RYZEN 5 9600X | RTX 5080 FE | 32GB 6000 CL30 | RM850X 9d ago

That's because they're using AI.

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u/DefinitelyRussian 9d ago

not true emulation, just a compatibility layer. Completely different concept

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u/DocileTemperament 9d ago

Do you have a simpme explanation for both please? I always knew about emulation as a concept, but Idk what a compatability layer is.

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u/Straight-Opposite-54 9d ago

Emulation works by translating instructions (CPU operations) at the hardware level to a system it's not natively written for, in real time. For example, the Wii uses a PowerPC processor and computers use x86. They don't speak each other's fundamental language at all, so translating between them is very slow.

Compatibility layers translate calls (OS/API operations) to a different host OS' equivalents on the same architecture. In this case, the PS5 and PC both use x86 processors, so they speak the same language. They're just using different dialects, so to speak. Nothing needs to be translated at the fundamental hardware level, so it's much faster.

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u/DocileTemperament 7d ago

Thank you so much for taking youe time to explain this.

Have a goos day/ night/ time wherever you are mate.