Microsoft has gotten a lot of praise for the backwards compatibility efforts with Xbox Series S and X, which not only plays games from all Xboxes, but also enhances them and it even supports Xbox One peripherals. For PlayStation 5, Sony hasn't revealed as many details and it only supports backwards compatibility with PlayStation 4, but when Digital Foundry recently got the opportunity to try this out, they came back impressed.
It turns out PlayStation 5 also uses the extra power to make games runs better, and they write:
"Every game that we've tested, bar perhaps one, runs with the full power of the PlayStation 5; the full CPU clocks, the full GPU power and just like Xbox Series X, the effects can be absolutely phenomenal and transformative, to the point where we're just blown away."
Gamespot has also done tests with the backwards compatibility, and has measured how fast the games load on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. It turns out, somewhat surprisingly considering the faster SSD of Sony's console, that Xbox Series X actually loads games faster.
They used five games with notoriously long loading times to measure this in different ways, and the result varies from very minor to quite a lot. Some of the biggest wins for Microsoft was Monster Hunter World with over eight seconds faster from launch to menu on Xbox Series X, Destiny 2 which is almost 16 seconds speedier from the menu the character screen and Final Fantasy XV that was nearly 15 seconds quicker from menu to save.