Comment on Sony reportedly prepping PlayStation 5 portable, plans to battle Nintendo's handheld dominance
chloyster@beehaw.org 3 weeks agoEh. They’ve been great at that but I dont see this as it. Handheld stuff is cool and popular right now. Don’t get me wrong, they definitely could self sabotage here. They 100% did with the vita and their egregiously expensive memory cards…
But the PSP and Vita were great devices aside from that. I could see this working
tiramichu@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Vita was technically impressive, far more capable than the DS. I’ve got an OLED Vita and I’m amazed how nice it still looks.
But the Vita inevietably lost tp Nintendo, because it struggled with popularity, and therefore struggled with number of games available. It’s a catch 22.
If Sony can make a portable that plays all your PS5 library (without needing to buy any of it again) then they might actually be on a winner.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
The Vita was a 3DS competitor, not a DS competitor. They kind of tried to outgimmick Nintendo with this one, unsuccessfully, I might add, because they didn’t build the system around these features, but slapped them on in such a way that developers and players could just ignore them.
The PS5 controller is somewhat of a descendant of this device, although its features are a bit better supported - and it would be trivially easy to integrate them into a handheld.
As for processing power, they need to find a way to get the same CPU power as a base PS5 and enough GPU power for somewhere around 1080p (since going any lower would render many games designed for the home console unplayable) into a cost-, heat, space- and power-efficient package. Most of this work is on AMD, Sony just has to package it. Maybe they can get away with a system that simply forces a lower output resolution for existing games so that less GPU power is needed - or they wait long enough for it to be possible to miniaturize a full-fat PS5 into a portable device. I think the latter is unlikely though, at least within a time frame that would allow for a PS5P to coexist with the PS5 instead of the PS6.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I genuinely think it’s already possible. The PS5 doesn’t exactly have a very new processor, it’s a 4000-series (desktop) Renoir, 7nm, Zen 2 architecture. The Z1E (the chip in the Lenovo Legion Go & ROG Ally X) is a 7040-series (mobile) Phoenix, 4nm, Zen 4/RDNA3 architecture.
The Z1E is basically 10% less performant for about 1/4 the juice. You could easily keep the same resolution, whilst dropping things like particles, shadow effects, etc that aren’t going to be as missed on a much smaller display. I’ve got a Legion but I believe the Ally X has a docked higher TDP mode that would push it to being competitive with the PS5, or at least it would certainly be possible with an active cooling dock.
AMD literally designed the Z1E for handhelds, so Sony would be remiss not to use it. That or a potential “Z2E” successor chip seen as this one is pushing over 18 months since it was announced.
cpu-monkey.com/…/compare_cpu-sony_playstation_5-v…
DdCno1@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
This would require per-game adjustments, which is not something you can ask of devs mid-gen, especially not retroactively. Developers already hate that they have to optimize for Xbox Series S - and that console was available from the start. This portable PS5 can only be a success if it “just works” and the only way to do that is by having the exact amount of CPU power as the home console and reducing the output resolution automatically, perhaps with the help of PSSR. Until there is an efficient APU that can pull this off, the console can’t be released.