Is it conceivable to be able to play PS4 games on other platforms? I.e. what are the theoretical minimum performance costs of emulating PS4?
Though I wonder how feasible would be trying to pull graphics driver from PS4 firmware and make it to work with Radeon HD7000 series GPU.
Additionally, GNM is a lot lower level than even something like Vulkan, and you can pass pointers directly between the CPU and GPU, they share the same memory space. It's this that makes emulating things tricky.
> Though I wonder how feasible would be trying to pull graphics driver from PS4 firmware
There is no "graphics driver", in the traditional sense.
...which makes the job much harder. Shading languages aren't terribly complicated; implementing a compiler from one to native spir-v/whatever is a reasonable task. Translating from one shader bytecode to another is a more involved operation.
Maybe such low-level optimizations are now longer necessary with more powerful consoles, though?
Regarding GPU drivers, that seems quite doable, as the PS4 Linux port uses slightly modified open source drivers, and gets good performance, IIRC.
As far as compute goes though the PS4 is basically just a 64-bit x86 machine with a strong integrated GPU, so the workloads can be adapted to run on desktop hardware.