The PlayStation Portal: Cloud Gaming’s Disappointing Leap Into the Future

Nonetheless, while Sony’s own criteria for accessing this feature indicates a minimum connection speed of 5 Mbps to initiate a cloud session, 7 Mbps for streaming a game at 720p resolution, and 13 Mbps for streaming at 1080p full HD—the maximum resolution for the Portal’s display—these figures appear to significantly undervalue the actual requirements for playing any game from the cloud.

In the café environment, achieving the lowest overall speed while still fulfilling the specified threshold for a 720p stream, the service was unconnectable. The library performed better, managing to connect and launch a streamed game—Spider-Man: Miles Morales—but the image quality wasn’t really consistent, reliable, or playable. Once more, tethering via phone yielded the best results, though it still took several attempts to access the cloud gaming library, and the video quality would sporadically drop, even so.

Now, one of the major anticipated advantages of cloud gaming is that the capabilities of the hardware you’re using are irrelevant. Whether it’s a pixel art indie or the latest ray-traced AAA title, the heavy lifting is handled remotely, and you merely receive an interactive video stream. However, Miles Morales remains one of the most visually rich entries in the PlayStation library, even when portrayed at 1080p for the Portal’s display instead of the full 4K that it delivers when played natively on a PS5 console. The depiction of New York City by developer Insomniac is so intricate, with web-swinging animations between skyscrapers being so fast-paced, that maybe the volume of visual data was creating challenges in delivering a stable stream to the PS Portal.

I opt to try Gris instead, an exquisite yet minimalist 2D platformer, where the watercolor effects represent the most demanding graphical representation—yet all the same issues arise, irrespective of connection speed. More frustratingly, in spite of system settings (accessible by swiping in from the top-right of the Portal’s touchscreen) indicating that the video quality was at 1080p resolution, the text displayed in the pause menu appeared noticeably blurred, and the entire image seemed to be at a much lower resolution than the system appeared to believe it was rendering.

On the Domestic Front

But what about at home? In spite of the capability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “standard” streaming from your own PS5, the Portal has always been marketed as more of a secondary screen accessory, primarily designed to liberate the main television. Even with the cloud beta supposedly removing a PS5 from the equation, the need for an online connection will always be superior on a dedicated, private broadband network, right? Well, sort of …

When evaluating PS Portal’s cloud performance on two private home networks, outcomes remained varied. In the first instance, achieving a speed test measurement of 574 Mbps, the Portal was able to connect to the cloud service to browse the library, but attempting to launch Miles Morales resulted in a message indicating that the game “couldn’t start due to a poor connection quality.” The Portal had lost one bar of connectivity, despite being in the same room as the router, which was deemed insufficient for operation.