However, while Sony own details to access the feature mention a 5-Mbps minimum connection speed to establish a cloud session, 7 Mbps to stream a game in 720p resolution, and 13 Mbps to stream in 1080p full HD— the max screen resolution of Portal—these numbers seem to greatly underestimate what to be honest required to play anything from the cloud.

Around the coffee shop, getting the slowest overall speed but still meeting the stated threshold for a 720p stream, even connecting to the service is impossible. The library just got better, connecting and launching a streamed game—Spider-Man: Miles Morales—but the image quality is never consistent, reliable, playable quality. Again, phone tethering works best, but it still takes a few attempts to connect to the cloud gaming catalog, and the video quality sometimes drops, even so.

Now, one of the big promised benefits of cloud gaming is that the power of the hardware you play with doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a pixel art indie or the latest ray-traced AAA tier title, the hard work is done remotely, and you just get an interactive video stream. still, Miles Morales is one of the best-looking titles in the PlayStation library, despite being rendered in 1080p for the Portal screen instead of the full 4K it offers natively on a PS5 console. Developer Insomniac’s vision of New York City is very detailed, the web-swinging animation between skyscrapers is very fast, which is probably the most visual information. is causing some issues with delivering a stable PS Portal stream.

I will try ticking instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer, with watercolor that transforms the most demanding graphical effect-but all the same problems show themselves, regardless of the connection speed. More annoyingly, despite the system settings (accessed by swiping from the top right of the Portal’s touchscreen) stating that the video quality reaches 1080p resolution, the onscreen text on pause menu is noticeably fuzzy and the whole image seems to be lower res than the system seems THINK it shows.

In front of the Home

What about at home? Despite the ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “regular” streaming from your own PS5, Portal has always been pitched as a second screen accessory, mainly intended to take out the Big TV . Even with the cloud beta supposedly taking the PS5 out of the equation, online needs are always better on a dedicated, private broadband network, right? Well, quite…

Tried PS Portal cloud credentials on two private home networks, still mixed results. The first, which obtained a speed test result of 574 Mbps, the Portal can connect to the cloud service to browse the catalog, but launch Miles Morales was met with a message saying that the game “could not start due to poor connection quality.” Portal dropped a connection bar, despite sitting in the same room as the router, and deemed it insufficient to run.