Comment on Sony reportedly prepping PlayStation 5 portable, plans to battle Nintendo's handheld dominance
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks agoI 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.
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.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
PS5, kinda famously, has no exclusive games. I doubt it would be that taxing on devs to essentially create a build that changes it from Ultra settings to High equivalent to the PC versions when they’re all running on an x86 platform. The Series S is just garbage hardware that Microsoft should have never released, the Z1E already outperforms it handily.
I also, out of curiosity, did a search for the “Z2E” and it looks like a large leak surrounding it hit last month: gamesradar.com/…/the-amd-chip-that-could-power-ne…
This chip would be more than capable of matching the PS5’s APU. But the Z2 they’re releasing alongside it will be decently cheaper while matching the Z1E’s performance. So it’ll come down to whether Sony prioritises cost or performance. My money’s on cost though, they’re going to want this thing to be cheaper than a Steam Deck, and the Z2E will put it in Legion Go/Ally X price territory.