All this news about a new, next-gen PlayStation handheld just won’t go away will it? We first started hearing reports about all this about a year ago, when Sony reportedly began prepping a PlayStation 5 portable, amid rumours that the company planned to battle Nintendo’s handheld dominance.
Then, back in June, plausible technical specifications for Sony’s next-gen handheld came to light via KeplerL2, kicking off some serious chatter about how realistic an idea a new PS handheld would be.
Then, in a recent firmware update, Sony added a new Power Saver mode to the PS5 – the latest actual contribution to Sony’s long-term eco-friendly initiative that we’ve seen evidence of in various PS5 models to date, with each iteration adding new ways to conserve power.
But this Power Saving mode is a bit different: it’s something supported across the whole PS5 family, and targets specific games – such as Death Stranding 2, Demon’s Souls and Days Gone Remastered – to reduce the power draw the console demands whilst playing. Social media was abuzz last week that this Power Saving mode was a suggestion that Sony is demoing something for the PS6, or related next-gen handheld, but a new video from Digital Foundry pours water on that idea.
“This eco-friendly mode is part of Sony’s drive to reduce greenhouse emissions first and foremost, and involves each developer custom-tuning each game to run at a lower power profile – often chopping power usage by 50% as a result,” says DF. “However, curiously, this mode’s throttled CPU, GPU and memory bandwidth puts PS5 in a similar state – spec-wise – to some aspects of the rumoured upcoming PlayStation handheld.”
Per the friends of Eurogamer at DF, the Power Saver profile does, indeed, reduce energy draw by as much as 50% or more for some games, the team outlines that the resultant ~100W being used by the machine is still far too high for any handheld running on suspected specs (below). In order to actually get within a tolerable range for handheld power draw, the machine would actually need to be somewhere around the 15W range to work with the majority of handheld batteries. That’s still pretty impressive, though: Days Gone Remastered manages to run at a fraction of the power it was running at before – both in performance and quality profiles – and achieves that with not too much impact to the final experience. Demon’s Souls, notably, has to be reduced from 60fps to 30fps.
What does that mean, in simple terms? That any potential portable device or power profile would require something else entirely – that this Power Saver profile is not enough, in and of itself, to make PS5 games suitable for handheld play. This profile, Rich Leadbetter of DF suggests, is a means by which developers “can get to grips with the key limitations of what this handheld will require”. Maybe this is a staging ground for the rumoured tech, but, at this moment, nothing more.
Last week, when approached about the idea that Sony may be working on a theorised handheld device, former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida noted that the idea of such a device “may be very attractive to all these people who have libraries of games on PS4 and PS5”. Indeed.
But it’s not just handhelds in Sony’s future, it would seem. There’s been a fair amount of chatter about the future of PlayStation lately, with PS5 system architect Mark Cerny and AMD senior vice president Jack Huynh presenting a video (above) on new technology, all but confirming what we can expect from the PlayStation 6.
In the same interview referenced above, Shuhei Yoshida also noted that Sony cannot simply “do the same thing [it has] been doing “to find success with the new hardware.
PlayStation and Sony have yet to share anything official about either the PS6 or a next-gen handheld device.
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