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One of the PS5’s most impressive exclusives leads next batch of PS Plus games

Sony revealed a large and varied batch of games coming to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium this month. Its headliners are Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, a true PS5 exclusive that utilizes the system’s technology for visually impressive and seamless rifts between areas and worlds, and Humanity, a quirky new puzzle game launching day one on PS Plus Extra.

Rift Apart is a must-play for PS5 owners, so it’s a good thing that Sony has finally made the decision to add it to its subscription service. Some great indie titles like Rain World and Lake, as well as the full Tomb Raider and Dishonored series, will also be available on PS Plus after May 16.

On the classic games front, it’s a PSP-dominated batch, with Logan’s Shadow completing the Syphon Filter series’ presence within the PlayStation Classics collection.

A lot of good games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man, are leaving PlayStation Plus on May 15, so it’s good to know that a lot of other interesting games will be hitting the service on the same day. Here’s the full list of games that will be added to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium later this week.

  • Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
  • Humanity
  • Watch Dogs: Legion
  • Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin
  • Bus Simulator 21: Next Stop
  • Thymesia
  • Rain World
  • Lake
  • Conan Exiles
  • Rune Factory 4 Special
  • Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town + Expansion Pass Set
  • The Evil Within 2
  • Wolfenstein: Youngblood
  • Dishonored 2
  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
  • Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20-Year Celebration
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
  • Soundfall
  • Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow
  • Blade Dancer Lineage of Light
  • Pursuit Force
  • Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered

If any of those listed games excite you, they will be available with PS Plus Extra and Premium starting on May 16.

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Tomas Franzese
Gaming Staff Writer
Tomas Franzese is a Staff Writer at Digital Trends, where he reports on and reviews the latest releases and exciting…
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.
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"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."
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"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."
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So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
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