| Kyuu said: We just learned through SteamDeck that it is already possible for a handheld device to house a downgraded RDNA2/Zen2 alongside an NVMe SSD at a fairly decent price and battery life. In other words, PS5's architecture is likely "scalable" as I was speculating/hoping it would be back in early 2018. |
Downgrading silicon to hit various formfactors, TDP and power consumption targets has been a thing for decades.
So I wasn't really surprised.
In-fact I argued Nintendo could have gone down the same path by opting for AMD mobile hardware before Tegra got confirmed by Nintendo themselves.
| Kyuu said: I'm pretty sure Sony will release a PS5 portable SKU targeting one-third the resolution of the standard model and lower framerate with the rest of the settings left mostly untouched, barring some exclusives. No, it won't be another Vita situation because it IS a PS5 for all intents and purposes. No one will go through the extra headache and risks of having to develop or rework games for it specifically; it's a complementary SKU that shares the same architecture. So it doesn't need to sell gangbusters to justify its existence financially. |
It's easier to scale a game up as newer/faster hardware is released or just simply let it run better automagically through scalable game engine design that uses things like dynamic resolutions/uncapped framerates.
Not really feasible to release a weaker SKU after powerful hardware has already been dropped... Games need to be reworked so performance doesn't bog down.
Microsoft is likely in a better position here as the Xbox Series S is a fairly low baseline as far as hardware is concerned, so theoretically in a few years they could release a mobile device that has the equivalent or better capabilities of the Xbox Series S in a handheld.
| Kyuu said: Thanks to the enormous success of the Switch and their own struggle in Japan, Sony is most likely going to do something about it. I'm not implying PS5 Portable would even sell more than 20% of Switch or Switch 2 worldwide. But 20% is a healthy additive to PS5's numbers. Again, it's an optional SKU with a massive library of quality games accessible. Vita wasn't that. |
Hopefully they do.
Microsoft is entering mobile in a big way with xCloud... And hopefully Sony enters with their own approach... And as we know, Nintendo is dominating this market.
What does that mean for us, the consumer? Potentially more innovation and lower prices. Win, win.
| Kyuu said: I think one potential hurdle is what Sony intends to do with the "PS5 Pro". If the intention is to further push the fidelity envelope, which might necessitate reducing the typical resolution for exclusives on the standard model down to as low as 1080p, then no amount of simple downscaling would be enough to make the portable version playable. Another challenge may be game sizes and storage system. Thoughts? |
Sony and Microsoft don't really set the resolution, that is up to game developers, the hardware dictates what level of resolution we typically see as it is the hardware holding it back.
I.E. The Xbox Series S due to it's significantly inferior hardware tends to fall around the 1080P-1440P area... However developers can run games at 4k on that system as we saw with Ori and the will of the wisps... And other games significantly come up short of 1080P.
All up the developer and how they intend to prioritize their finite system resources.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
