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However, while Sony own specifications to access the mentioned function a minimum connection speed of 5-Mbps to establish a session in the cloud, 7 Mbps to transmit a game at a resolution of 720p, and 13 Mbps to stream at 1080p Full HD – the maximum resolution of the screen of the Portal – these numbers seem to greatly underestimate what it is indeed needed to play something from the cloud.
In the coffee shop environment, I get the slowest overall speed, but even meeting the stated threshold for a 720p stream, even connecting to the service was impossible. The library just got better, connect and launch a streaming game –Spider-Man: Miles Morales-but the image quality wasn’t really of consistent, reliable, playable quality. Again, the phone’s tethering did the best, but it still took a few tries to connect to the cloud game catalog, and the video quality dropped from time to time, even then.
Now, one of the big promised benefits of cloud gaming is that the power of the hardware you’re playing on doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a pixel art indie or the latest AAA ray-traced title, the hard work is done remotely, and you just get an interactive video stream. again, 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 web-swinging between skyscrapers so fast, that perhaps the enormous amount of visual information. was causing some problems in providing a stable stream to the PS Portal.
I try Grey instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer, with watercolor swashes the most demanding graphic effect, but all the same problems appear, whatever the connection speed. More annoying, despite the system settings (accessed by scrolling from the top right of the Portal touchscreen) saying that the video quality went to a resolution of 1080p, the text on the screen in the pause menu it was noticeably blurry and the whole image looked much lower than res. the system seemed he thinks it showed
On the Home Front
What about at home? Despite the ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “regular” streaming from your own PS5, the Portal was still presented as more than a second screen accessory, mainly intended to free up the Big TV. Even with cloud beta apparently taking a PS5 out of the equation, the online requirement will still be better off on a dedicated private 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 was met with a message saying that the game “could not start due to poor connection quality”. The Portal had left a connection bar, despite sitting in the same room as the router, and that it considered insufficient to run.
