What's this all about?
Backwards-compatible.com has been designed as an easy means of finding Playstation 4 games that are compatible with Playstation 5, and most crucially providing data on their performance on the console.
While most Playstation 4 games work on the PS5, there's little information available in terms of their performance in comparison with both the Playstation 4 and Playstation 4 Pro, in many cases leaving it up to gamers to test games for improvements or issues.
Sony has marked digital games on Playstation Store that are not compatible with the PS5 as 'Playable on: PS4 only', as well as ones that may exhibit errors. There's a handy list here at Pushsquare.com.
Games which received PS4 Pro visual upgrades in most cases see the same performance improvements on PS5, however there are additional potential benefits such as locked 60 FPS.
Certain games will no doubt receive performance improvements in the future, but this isn't guaranteed. Others require workarounds to improve performance such as reverting back to an unpatched version of a game to remove the frame rate cap.
Credits
Credit for the initial performance information goes to Liabe Brave at Resetera for the amazing data he's assembled, as well as the posters there who have been tirelessly trawling through their back catalogue of PS4 games and uploading the results to Youtube. My work was simply structuring the data into a browsable site as a fun side project, though I'm now working through a large number of missing titles.
Contribute
The site currently holds covers a very small proportion of the PS4 back catalogue which according to Wikipedia stands at 3125 games. You can click 'Add Title' from the Browse/Search page and I'll add it to the site.
If you've spotted an error, you can submit an update from a game page. You can also add a Youtube video link to the game page and it will be added once reviewed.
What I'm working on
Here's a short list of tasks I'll be working on when time permits:
- Adding publisher, developer, genre and release date information to all games
- Adding new games as and when data becomes available
- Adding a very basic user function to track games, 'wishlist' games for a patch and add them to your collection
Updates
03/04/2021 - General Update
Updates have been made for many games that have received patches since February. It's great to see patches coming in and for the most part as free updates for PS4 game owners.
I've removed Amazon & eBay affiliate links from game pages as I dislike the tracking they use.
11/02/2021 - Genre, Developer & Publisher Update
Genre, Developer & Publisher data has been added to around 400 titles and you can now search/browse by these tags.
08/02/2021 - Big Update Part 1
350 new games have been added to the database! Thanks to everyone who submitted a game request. The next update will be focused on VR!
29/01/2021 - Major Update Coming Soon
I've assembled a list of over 500 games not currently listed on the site. I'm working through these in spreadsheet form and researching as I go, so these will likely be uploaded in one batch in the next week or so.
28/01/2021 - Thank you all for the very unexpected positive response! I've now updated the site to display videos where ones have been submitted. User notes are also added to relevant game pages and many errors corrected. Thanks to everyone who has shared a correction or submitted a video so far.
- Videos are now displayed (when submitted) on Game pages along with the YouTube user and any notes
- User submitted notes are now displayed on Game pages
- A new field has been added for 'Upgraded for PS5', this applies to games patched with PS5 specific improvements
- A new field has been added for 'Separate PS5 Version' for games with PS4/PS5 specific versions. I'm limiting this to games with free updates until I find a better way to handle this.
- A new field has been added for both DualSense and RayTracing support for games with PS5 specific versions.