I saw an article from Engadget today describing an effort to get PS5 games running on an XBox Series X. The truth of the story can be boiled down to a few words: no, it doesn’t really work in a practical sense.
The challenges
Firstly, your XBox needs to be running in developer mode. This requires a few steps and you have to switch back to retail mode in order to play regular XBox games. Possible to do, but a bit irritating.
Secondly your games have to run completely within 5 gigabytes of RAM. This is a developer mode restriction that can only be overcome if you run the game using Visual Studio debugger which I presume precludes running the PS5 translation layer.
Thirdly, only a handful of games have been tested and found to work thus far. And “work” is a pretty generous term: their performance is not great, sound may not function, and controls may not be compatible.
Why this works at all
The PS5 and XBox Series X are very similar machines using the same processor and video chips. Most of the differences come in the way memory is managed, how the controllers work, and of course in the BIOS of the machine. So it is possible to create a fairly thin translation layer between the PS5 game and XBox physical hardware: No complex emulation of physical hardware is required for the most part.
I suspect that even this limited capability code will get stomped on by Sony and Microsoft for various rules violations and copyright claims if it continues to be developed into something practical. So PS5X will remain a curiosity for hackers who want to say “I did that” more than a practical way to run Playstation games on XBox hardware.
the header image for this post was AI generated using ChatGPT