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However, while Sony own specifications To access the feature, mention 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 at 1080p Full HD (the maximum screen resolution of the Portal). These numbers seem to greatly underestimate what is in fact needed to play anything from the cloud.
In the coffee shop environment, getting the overall slower speed but still hitting the threshold set for a 720p stream, even connecting to the service was impossible. The library fared better, coming online and launching a streamed game.Spider-Man: Miles Morales—But the image quality was not really consistent, reliable and reproducible. Again, the dial-up connection worked better, but it still took a few tries to connect to the cloud gaming catalog, and the video quality occasionally dropped, even then.
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 or the latest ray-traced AAA title, the hard work is done remotely and you just get 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 screen rather than the full 4K it offers natively on a PS5 console. Developer Insomniac’s vision of New York City is so detailed, the animation of the grid swinging between skyscrapers so fast, that perhaps the sheer amount of visual information was causing some issues delivering a stable stream to PS Portal.
I try grey instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platform game, with watercolor decorative elements, the most demanding graphic effect; However, the same problems occur regardless of the connection speed. More annoyingly, even though the system settings (accessed by swiping from the top right of the Portal’s touchscreen) said the video quality reached 1080p resolution, the text on screen in the pause menu was noticeably blurry and the entire image appeared much lower than the system seemed think was showing.
On the home front
And at home? Despite the ability to connect to a public Wi-Fi network for “normal” streaming from your own PS5, the Portal was always presented as a second-screen accessory, intended primarily to free up the big TV. Even with the cloud beta seemingly removing a PS5 from the equation, the online requirement will always be better on a private, dedicated broadband network, right? Well, a little…
When testing PS Portal cloud credentials on two private home networks, the results were still mixed. The first, by obtaining a speed test result of 574 Mbps, the Portal was able to connect to the cloud service to browse the catalog, but when launching Miles Morales received a message saying that the game “could not be started due to poor connection quality.” The Portal had lowered a connectivity bar, despite being in the same room as the router, and that was considered insufficient to function.
