Sony’s recent introduction of cloud gaming features on PlayStation Portal raised the potential for a seismic change in how video games are distributed and accessed. Even though the handheld device doesn’t play anything natively, designed instead to remotely mirror whatever is running on your PS5, the beta launch of a dedicated game streaming feature raised the curious possibility of being able to bypass the PS5 entirely.

All players would need, in theory, is the $200/£200 PlayStation Portal and a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription, then they could access a curated library of games wherever they had a fast enough internet connection. The idea would surely be appealing to some players. The Portal and a rolling subscription would cost more than buying a PS5 console in the long run, but month-to-month may work out more economical. For those willing to stick to playing only the titles included in the cloud catalog, it could be especially appealing, given individual games can cost upwards of $70/£70.

Having now spent a few weeks testing the new features out though, it’s very clear that this beta still has a long way to go before it’s going to disrupt the industry or change player behavior in any meaningful way. In short, cloud gaming on PS Portal retains the same problems cloud gaming has always had, especially if you want to play anywhere other than at home.

PlayStation (Not So) Portable

The requirement for a constant internet connection to do anything with the Portal is an inherent limiting factor, but its core remote viewer function has at least been refined for increasingly stable performance in the year since the handheld’s release. A summer 2024 update allowing the gadget to connect to public Wi-Fi sign-in portals was a quiet landmark, making connecting to a new network as easy as configuring your phone or laptop. Playing on Portal away from home was suddenly more viable, and bears out in tests now.

While speed remains a limiter—the faster the connection, the better the experience—streaming my PS5 to the Portal worked in several out-of-home tests. At a coffee shop, getting a network speed test result of a meager 11 Mbps, I was able to play the RPG Metaphor: ReFantazio at a passable quality. The image was notably blurry at times and occasionally suffered from bouts of artifacting, particularly in combat, but it was playable.

At a public library, getting speeds of approximately 23 Mbps, the performance was far more stable, with only very occasional visual dropouts. The best performance came from tethering to my own phone, getting a speed of 47 Mbps and not having to share bandwidth with other network users, which allowed me to zip around Astro Bot’s colorful worlds unimpeded.

Unfortunately, when you switch over to cloud gaming, this all falls apart. Setting it up is simple enough—a matter of a quick system update and then opting into the beta through settings. Once that’s done, booting up the Portal gives a new home screen, allowing users to choose between connecting to their own PS5 or browsing the cloud gaming catalog instead.

However, while Sony’s own specifications for accessing the feature cite a 5-Mbps minimum connection speed to establish a cloud session, 7 Mbps to stream a game at 720p resolution, and 13 Mbps to stream at 1080p full HD—the max resolution of the Portal’s screen—these numbers seem to greatly underestimate what’s actually required to play anything from the cloud.

In the coffee shop environment, getting the slowest overall speed but still meeting the stated threshold for a 720p stream, even connecting to the service was impossible. The library fared better, connecting and launching a streamed game—Spider-Man: Miles Morales—but the image quality wasn’t really of consistent, reliable, playable quality. Again, phone tethering performed best, but it still took a few attempts to connect to the cloud gaming catalog, and the video quality would still occasionally drop out, even then.

Now, one of the great promised benefits of cloud gaming is that the power of the hardware you’re playing on doesn’t matter. Whether a pixel art indie or the latest ray-traced AAA tier title, the hard work is done remotely, and you’re just getting 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’s 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 speedy, that perhaps the sheer amount of visual information was causing some issues in delivering a stable stream to PS Portal.

I try Gris instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer, with watercolor swashes the most demanding graphical effect—yet all the same problems present themselves, whatever the connection speed. More annoyingly, despite system settings (accessed by swiping in from the top-right of the Portal’s touchscreen) saying the video quality was coming through at 1080p resolution, onscreen text in the pause menu was noticeably fuzzy and the whole image seemed much lower res than the system seemed to think it was displaying.

On the Home Front

What about at home though? Despite the ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “regular” streaming from your own PS5, the Portal was always pitched as more of a second screen accessory, mainly intended to free up the Big TV. Even with the cloud beta ostensibly taking a PS5 out of the equation, the online requirement is always going to be better on a dedicated, private broadband network, right? Well, kinda …

Testing PS Portal’s cloud credentials on two private home networks, results were still mixed. The first one, getting 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 the game “couldn’t start due to poor connection quality.” The Portal had dropped one bar of connectivity, despite sitting in the same room as the router, and that deemed it insufficient to run.

Later attempts in the same setting fared better, launching the game but throwing up a few moments of stuttering and artifacting. The second home test, getting 250 Mbps, saw similar problems, not being able to connect to the service at all or struggling to deliver a consistent enough service to make a game in any way enjoyable.

Another problem that occurred, both at home and away, was that control inputs would occasionally lag when cloud streaming. One of Spider-Man’s core combat mechanics is reacting to flashes of his spider-sense, and lag renders that impossible. Even simple jumps or web-spinning begin to fail when the game is responding whole seconds behind your button presses.

While both home network environments fared better than public ones, even the faster connection speeds couldn’t make the cloud gaming experience practical for longer play sessions.

Cloudy Skies

It must be stressed that cloud gaming on PS Portal is still a beta—teething problems are to be expected, as should be improvements as it develops. However, even aside from performance, Sony needs to drastically improve discoverability in the cloud gaming catalog. At the time of writing, titles are organized by how recently they were added to PlayStation Plus, with no way to sort by title or search, although once you’ve played a game once, it’s added to a “recently played” list which helps slightly.

Similarly, some nongaming features players may be used to from their PS5 currently don’t work—trophies, for one. You’ll get an alert that you’ve unlocked a trophy for some in-game achievement, but not what for, forcing you to check on either a PS5 or the PS App on your phone. You also can’t take screen captures, broadcast your game, or use voice chat features. None of these are essential to playing, especially for single-player titles, but are certainly nice-to-haves and notable by their absence.

If we’re being optimistic, all these restrictions could indicate Sony is trying to nail basic cloud gaming performance before adding bells and whistles—making sure it can deliver a solid game stream before complicating matters with additional features. It still has some way to go on that front though.

To be entirely clear, Sony does not and never has marketed the PS Portal as a portable console in its own right. Support pages on the PlayStation website even have it categorized under accessories. While cloud gaming could one day give it utility beyond being merely a PS5’s second screen, the feature isn’t going to turn Portal into Sony’s answer to the Nintendo Switch, an integral gaming device in its own right. Unreliable performance even on lightning-fast connections means that at present, game streaming on PS Portal feels like a curious gimmick at best, rather than the next step in gaming we might have hoped for.