However, while Sony individual specifications To access this feature, quote a minimum connection speed of 5 Mbps to establish a cloud session, 7 Mbps to stream gameplay in 720p, and 13 Mbps to stream in 1080p full HD— the maximum resolution of the Portal screen—what these numbers seem to underestimate Actually needed to play anything from the cloud.
In the coffee shop environment, overall speeds were slowest but still met the stated threshold for a 720p stream, even without being able to connect to the service. Library works better, connects, and launches a streaming game—Spider-Man: Miles Morales—but the image quality isn't exactly stable, reliable, and playable. Again, phone tethering worked best, but it still took a few tries to connect to the cloud gaming catalog and video quality still dropped at times.
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 it's an indie piece of pixel art or the latest ray-tracing AAA title, the hard work is done remotely and you only get an interactive video stream. Still, Miles Morales is one of the most visually sumptuous titles in the PlayStation library, even rendered at 1080p for Portal's display instead of the full 4K it offers when running natively on the PS5 console. Developer Insomniac's vision of New York City is very detailed, the animation of web-slinging between skyscrapers is very fast, perhaps a huge amount of visual information. used to be causing some problems in providing a stable stream to PS Portal.
I try Gris instead, a beautiful but minimalist 2D platformer, with watercolors creating the most demanding graphical effects—but all the same problems still appear, regardless of connection speed. More annoyingly, although the system settings (accessed by swiping in from the top right of the Portal's touchscreen) indicate video quality at 1080p resolution, on-screen text in the temporary menu stops being noticeably blurry and the entire image appears to be much lower resolution than the system appears to be think it is showing.
On the home front
What about at home? Despite its ability to connect to public Wi-Fi for “regular” streaming from your own PS5, Portal was always meant to be a second-screen accessory, primarily intended to free up the Big TV. Even if the cloud beta seems to have taken the PS5 out of the equation, streaming will always be better on a dedicated, private broadband network, right? Um, it seems…
Testing PS Portal's cloud credentials on two private home networks, the results were mixed. First, get a speed test result of 574 Mbps, the Gateway can connect to the cloud service to browse the catalog, but launch Miles Morales received a message saying the game “could not start due to poor connection quality.” The portal was missing a connection stick, despite being in the same room as the router, and that was deemed insufficient to run.