However, even if Sony own specifications To access the feature, quote 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 in Full HD 1080p – the maximum screen resolution of the portal – these figures seem to greatly underestimate what is In fact required to play anything from the cloud.
In a cafe environment, getting the slowest overall speed while meeting the stated threshold for a 720p stream even connecting to the service was impossible. The library fared better, logging in and streaming a game—Spider-Man: Miles Morales– but the image quality wasn’t really consistent, reliable and playable. Again, phone tethering performed better, but it still took a few attempts to connect to the cloud gaming catalog, and even then video quality still occasionally dropped.
Now, one of the big promised benefits of cloud gaming is that it doesn’t matter how powerful the hardware you’re playing on. Whether it’s a pixel art indie game or the latest ray-traced AAA title, the hard work is done remotely and you just get an interactive video stream. Always, Miles Morales is one of the most visually sumptuous titles in the PlayStation library, even rendered at 1080p for the Portal screen rather than the full 4K it offers running natively on a PS5 console. Developer Insomniac’s vision of New York City is so detailed, the animation of the web-swing between skyscrapers so fast, that perhaps the amount of visual information was causing issues when providing a stable stream on the PS Portal.
I try Gray instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer, with the most demanding watercolor graphical effects, but the same problems present themselves regardless of connection speed. Even more annoying, despite the system settings (accessed by swiping down from the upper right corner of the Portal touchscreen) indicating that video quality was displayed at 1080p resolution, on-screen text in the pause menu was visibly blurry and the entire image looked much lower resolution. the system seemed think it was displayed.
On the home front
But what about at home? Despite the ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “regular” streaming from your own PS5, Portal has always been presented as a second-screen accessory, primarily intended to free up Big TV. Even though the cloud beta ostensibly excludes a PS5 from the equation, online requirements will always be better on a private, dedicated broadband network, right? Well, a little…
Testing PS Portal’s cloud credentials on two private home networks, the results were still mixed. The first, obtaining a speed test result of 574 Mbps, the portal could connect to the cloud service to browse the catalog, but launching Miles Morales received a message that the game “could not start due to poor connection quality.” The portal had lost a connectivity bar, despite being in the same room as the router, causing it to be insufficient to function.
