Cloud gaming on PlayStation Portal isn’t the exciting step forward we were hoping for

However, Sony’s own specifications to access the feature specify a minimum connection speed of 5 Mbps to establish a cloud session, 7 Mbps to stream a game at 720p resolution and 13 Mbps to stream at 1080p Full HD – the maximum resolution of the portal screen – these numbers seem to greatly underestimate what is Strictly speaking required to play something from the cloud.

In the coffee shop environment, getting the slowest overall speed but still hitting the advertised threshold for a 720p stream made it impossible to even connect to the service. The library did better by connecting and starting a streamed game –Spider-Man: Miles Morales– but the image quality wasn’t really consistent, reliable and playable. Again, phone tethering performed best, but it still took a few attempts to connect to the cloud gaming catalog, and even then the video quality occasionally dropped.

One of the big promised benefits of cloud gaming is that the performance of the hardware you’re playing on doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a pixel art indie or the latest AAA tier ray tracing title, the hard work is done remotely and all you get is an interactive video stream. Despite it, Miles Morales is one of the most visually intensive titles in the PlayStation library, even rendered at 1080p for the Portal screen rather than the full 4K resolution it offers when running natively on a PS5 console. Developer Insomniac’s vision of New York City is so detailed, the animation of the web swinging between skyscrapers so fast, that perhaps the sheer volume of visual information Was This causes some problems in providing a stable stream to the PS portal.

I’ll try it Gris Instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer with watercolor sweep as the most demanding graphical effect – and yet the same problems arise regardless of connection speed. Even more annoying was that the on-screen text in the pause menu was noticeably blurry and the entire image seemed much lower resolution, even though the system settings (accessed by swiping from the top right of the Portal touchscreen) said that video quality would be achieved at a resolution of 1080p System seemed to do it think it was displayed.

On the home front

But how about at home? Despite the ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “normal” streaming from your own PS5, the Portal was always touted as more of a second-screen accessory, intended primarily to free up the big TV. Even though the cloud beta supposedly removes a PS5 from the equation, online needs will always be better on a dedicated, private broadband network, right? Well, sort of…

When testing PS Portal’s cloud credentials on two private home networks, the results were still mixed. In the first test, the portal was able to connect to the cloud service to browse the catalog with a speed test result of 574 Mbit/s, but failed to start Miles Morales received a message that the game “could not start due to poor connection quality”. Despite being in the same room as the router, the portal had lost a connectivity bar, rendering it insufficient to operate.