Gran Turismo 5 due out November 24 (in theory)

By Ryan Fleming November 12, 2010

It is hard to claim that Gran Turismo 5 is “worth the wait”. After all, could any video game be worth a four year wait? In the time since GT5 was originally supposed to be released, Microsoft has released two Forza games, several arcade racers like Burnout and Need for Speed have hit the market, and several others like Project Gotham have been there to fill the void. It was a more primitive time, where we savages did not even know what an iPad was, and 3D technology was limited to movies about space stations and sharks. The world has changed since those forgotten days of ’06, so can GT5 possibly live up to its own hype?

Looks like we will find out on November 24, when the PlayStation3 exclusive is supposed to be released, according to Sony. Now, we have danced this dance with SCEA many, many, many times before. GT5 has been issued a release date, and we gamers happily drink the kool-aid before hearing that yet another delay has pushed back the release date. But it has been over four years worth of delays. Four. Years.

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But things are actually looking good for the November 24 release. Earlier reports suggested that the game had already shipped, and that retailers were told to expect a November 30 debut, but it seems like– in one of the more ironic twists in recent video game news– Sony actually moved up the GT5 launch.

So once again, Gran Turismo 5 has a release date. In theory it will be out in North America and Europe on November 24, and in Japan the following day. Color us cautiously optimistic…

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…

Gaming

Why playing PS3 games on a PS5 is way harder than it sounds

A stack of PS3 games.

PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
We're over 15 years removed from the PS3's launch, and there's still no good way to play many classic PS3 titles like Infamous or Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern platforms. Sony is content to continue PlayStation Now's approach to PS3 gaming with PlayStation Plus Premium. This stands out when Xbox and Nintendo are doing a relatively good job at natively emulating or remastering games from older systems for modern platforms.
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. 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. 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.
CELL it
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. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail.

"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. "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 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. 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.
"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 type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
These extra steps on a function that developers would usually contain to the GPU make emulation difficult. Still, a large dedicated team at RPCS3 has put in a lot of work to create a functional emulator for modern PCs. According to Whatcookie, it's totally possible to get PS3 emulation working on a PS5.
"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…

Gaming

Not buying a PlayStation 5 made Gran Turismo 7 better for me

Gran Turismo 7 played with a steering wheel.

It wasn’t for lack of trying, but I didn’t manage to buy a PlayStation 5 before the launch of Gran Turismo 7, despite it being my plan after the game’s long-awaited launch date was revealed. Instead I stuck with my trusty PlayStation 4 and bought a racing cockpit for my living room with the money I would have spent on a new console.

Now a couple of weeks into playing, I am so glad the PlayStation 5 proved to be elusive. For all its hardware -acilitated graphical upgrades, I cannot imagine how Gran Turismo 7 could actually play any better than it does when I’m sitting in my race seat holding on to that steering wheel.
I gave up on the PS5
When Gran Turismo 7’s March 4 release date was revealed, I began to look in earnest for a PS5. It’s not new information that the console is hard to find, but it was such a pain to get here in the U.K., I only had one opportunity to buy one over the period of several months. The pack I almost settled for was a digital edition, which wasn’t my preference at all, with a pair of controllers when I really only needed one, and a game I'd never play. The nearly 600 British pound price ($792 U.S.) also seemed inflated for what I was getting.

Gaming

Gran Turismo 7 is back online following update error

Three cars come racing around a tight turn in Gran Turismo 7.

After going offline, leaving most of its features unplayable for any users for over 24 hours, Gran Turismo 7 is back up, with its developer, Polyphony Digital, explaining just what happened.

In a post on the game's website, Polyphony Digital president Kazunori Yamauchi explained that what should have been a simple update rollout led to its latest PlayStation exclusive racing title being unavailable for a day. "Immediately before the release of the 1.07 update," reads the post, "we discovered an issue where the game would not start properly in some cases on product versions for the PS4 and PS5." The developer went on to explain that this error could have somehow impacted users' save data, leading to the game's outage.