Cloud Gaming on the PlayStation Portal Isn’t the Exciting Step Forward We’d Hoped for

However, while Sony’s own specifications for accessing the feature cite a 5-Mbps minimum connection speed to establish a cloud session, 7 Mbps to stream a game at 720p resolution, and 13 Mbps to stream at 1080p full HD—the max resolution of the Portal’s screen—these numbers seem to greatly underestimate what’s actually required to play anything from the cloud.

In the coffee shop environment, getting the slowest overall speed but still meeting the stated threshold for a 720p stream, even connecting to the service was impossible. The library fared better, connecting and launching a streamed game—Spider-Man: Miles Morales—but the image quality wasn’t really of consistent, reliable, playable quality. Again, phone tethering performed best, but it still took a few attempts to connect to the cloud gaming catalog, and the video quality would still occasionally drop out, even then.

Now, one of the great promised benefits of cloud gaming is that the power of the hardware you’re playing on doesn’t matter. Whether a pixel art indie or the latest ray-traced AAA tier title, the hard work is done remotely, and you’re just getting an interactive video stream. Still, Miles Morales is one of the most visually sumptuous titles in the PlayStation library, even rendered at 1080p for the Portal’s 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 web-swinging between skyscrapers so speedy, that perhaps the sheer amount of visual information was causing some issues in delivering a stable stream to PS Portal.

I try Gris instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer, with watercolor swashes the most demanding graphical effect—yet all the same problems present themselves, whatever the connection speed. More annoyingly, despite system settings (accessed by swiping in from the top-right of the Portal’s touchscreen) saying the video quality was coming through at 1080p resolution, onscreen text in the pause menu was noticeably fuzzy and the whole image seemed much lower res than the system seemed to think it was displaying.

On the Home Front

What about at home though? Despite the ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “regular” streaming from your own PS5, the Portal was always pitched as more of a second screen accessory, mainly intended to free up the Big TV. Even with the cloud beta ostensibly taking a PS5 out of the equation, the online requirement is always going to be better on a dedicated, private broadband network, right? Well, kinda …

Testing PS Portal’s cloud credentials on two private home networks, results were still mixed. The first one, getting a speed test result of 574 Mbps, the Portal could connect to the cloud service to browse the catalog, but launching Miles Morales was met with a message saying the game “couldn’t start due to poor connection quality.” The Portal had dropped one bar of connectivity, despite sitting in the same room as the router, and that deemed it insufficient to run.