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.
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.
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