A lot of the posts in this thread are not taking into account the massive elephant in the room that being the potential impact of AI in the coming years. With Genie 3 being a huge leap over Genie 2 with just an 8 month gap the video game industry could change a lot soon depending on how much further that sort of tech improves over the next 5-10 years. Hardware that isn't AI capable enough could become obsolete fast.

Yeah I didn't think about the effect AI will. That will surely help throughout handhelds.

Handhelds are so disadvantaged over dedicated home consoles that it doesn't matter what tech is in it, for 500$ or less the maximum they could achieve is PS5 performance. Look at Switch 2, it's completely limited to 30fps in third party titles despite launching 5 years after PS5/XBSS/X. There isn't going to be any magical AI tech that will allow a handheld to surpass the PS5 in a price point that competes with Switch 2. That's OK though, as they only need to achieve PS5 performance for it to be a viable platform. 

Sometimes it's a matter of timing. 2-3 years of tech advancement can result in marginal or huge results. A paradigm shift may occur out of nowhere. The handheld should be anywhere between 1/5th to 1/10th the power of PS6 depending on the prices and task. But the tech may advance to a point where the handheld leaves the PS5 in the dust in some tasks, it isn't a foregone conclusion that it'll be universally weaker than PS5. It might be priced higher than $500 too, with a cheaper "Vita TV" style variant. Lower profit margins per hardware (or higher losses) is also a possibility. There's too much we don't know yet.

What's so bad about having heavy games limited to 30fps in a handheld? Lower framerate is one way to get around hardware limitations without compromising the game's vision. People who don't like the lower fps/resolution/settings will just get the home console and enjoy the superior version, but options are nice and millions will love the handheld for what it is.

Oh, it can go.

Even if you take "standard" paradigm, AKA ray traced polygons, there's never enough power, let alone other demanding stuff.

I'm referring to this sort of thing. Depending on how much further this improves in the coming years the speculation going on in this thread could potentially become outdated fast. We could start to see a shift from traditional gaming to world models basically.

Yeah, this is most likely THE future - drop your favourite book/novel/comic/D&D campaign/... into something like this, set the desired genre/art style and all other stuff and play.

However, I don't think we're anywhere near to something like this to be generated on home console/PC. But, if someone offers streaming cloud service with such a thing...oh yeah, I can see this happening in next 10-15 years.

It's not that 30fps is always bad, it's just that for games like Borderlands and COD you need 60fps for a good experience. I don't believe Sony product consumers will be OK with going back to 30fps in COD because COD has been 60fps since the PS3 days. It's just the bare minimum for certain titles now. 

The Switch 2 T239 chip had completed final production and was ready for use back in 2020/2021 I think, so these things have a major lag. My point is, that Sony will already know what chip they are using and it's not going to have any special tech in it because we are still about 3-4 years away from that. Yes, it will have AI upscaling fsr4 but I don't think it will go much beyond that. 

I think, that this is way too advanced to be in any low end consumer tech for the next 5 years surely? This kind of thing to me looks like a PS7 type of thing rather than PS6P. 

If people are fine with 30 fps, which obviously millions are, then fair enough.  For me fps is about gameplay.  The higher the fps the lower the latency is, which means faster and more accurate controls.  I just don't like 30 fps and avoid it at all costs, the controls feel far too sluggish.    

Likely though what I'm getting at is if the PS6 models release in 2027 or 2028 but just a few years later this sort of thing starts to take off in a big way then the PS6 could become obsolete way faster than most people are expecting. I dunno if that'll happen but it's a possibility worth keeping in mind with how much uncertainty there is over the continued advancement of AI over the next several years. Certain experts think AGI and ASI are just 5-10 years away while others think it's still gonna be decades till that happens so there's massive variance with how the coming years could go.