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[BbMajor7th]

I'm not sure how DF dropped the ball here.

Honestly, I just get the impression it was an 'old man yells at cloud' moment. It doesn't fit within their traditional wheel house so it puts them on the defensive. Arguing that it should be able to emulate decades-old retro games was a real 'let's get you to bed grandma' moment (ignoring the fact that Portal lacks onboard storage) - more open-minded folks have found plenty to both like and critique, but Richard had to limit his praise to stuff that made sense to him, like screen quality.

 

[SlimySnake]

I tried using my phone as a hotspot in the airport and it was pretty laggy. My upload speed isn’t great, I’m guessing fiber works a lot better for playing away from home. I was just experimenting though, I bought the portal to use at home and it works very well for that.

I used my phone's 5G hotspot at home and the remote play worked fine.

I will test it at my brother's house tonight with his wifi and my 5g hotspot to see if it holds up. roughly 15 miles away, but his house is near a verizon tower where i get like 100 Mbps on my 5G phone so not sure if thats going to be as bad as an airport which usually has bad cell service in general due to them being outside city limits.

 

[Zathalus]

If you look at Richards review of the Nvidia Shield all those years ago the difference in tone is shocking. In that review he waffled on about how he's impressed by the zero-compromise 360 form factor controller, how it was difficult not to be impressed by PC streaming, despite it being a shitty res and framerate (720p/30fps) with macro blocking even on a crap small screen. Impressed by the input latency despite it being worse. How it was the "PC portable" envisaged by Gabe himself. How the use of a wifi router made it better than the Wii U by offering range to play from anywhere you have connection, how 802.11n was great despite 802.11ac (Draft 3) routers existing at the time. How they built a niche product 'for us' the 'core gamer'. And all that excitement for a $299 device back when inflation wasn't through the roof. He's somehow forgotten all these things to be excited about when it comes to the Portal. instead he's "disapponted" as always.

Looking at that review the Shield actually has less latency then the PlayStation Portal. 50ms vs 80ms on the Portal. Imagine that, a 10 year old device streaming from a PC that is dramatically worse then a PS5 yet has less latency.

Its even funnier when you complain about the price. The shield is a 10 year old handheld that can still do more then the Portal can. It was a full Android tablet powered by the most powerful mobile chipset at the time and was among the first dedicated PC streaming devices. No wonder Richard was impressed in 2013. Most people were.

It been 10 years, most people would rightly expect a bigger leap in streaming performance. Not a regression in latency.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Looking at that review the Shield actually has less latency then the PlayStation Portal. 50ms vs 80ms on the Portal. Imagine that, a 10 year old device streaming from a PC that is dramatically worse then a PS5 yet has less latency.

Its even funnier when you complain about the price. The shield is a 10 year old handheld that can still do more then the Portal can. It was a full Android tablet powered by the most powerful mobile chipset at the time and was among the first dedicated PC streaming devices. No wonder Richard was impressed in 2013. Most people were.

It been 10 years, most people would rightly expect a bigger leap in streaming performance. Not a regression in latency.

Industrial-strength cherry-picking - ignore almost everything else in a long-ass post and focus on the one thing that drives your narrative.

Worth pointing out that a tech powerhouse like Google with massive cloud server infrastructure wasn't able to fix latency with a dedicated streaming platform, why would you expect a $200 accessory streaming from a $400 console to magically fix what companies with ten times the resources haven't been able to?

 

[PaintTinJr]

Looking at that review the Shield actually has less latency then the PlayStation Portal. 50ms vs 80ms on the Portal. Imagine that, a 10 year old device streaming from a PC that is dramatically worse then a PS5 yet has less latency.

Its even funnier when you complain about the price. The shield is a 10 year old handheld that can still do more then the Portal can. It was a full Android tablet powered by the most powerful mobile chipset at the time and was among the first dedicated PC streaming devices. No wonder Richard was impressed in 2013. Most people were.

It been 10 years, most people would rightly expect a bigger leap in streaming performance. Not a regression in latency.

This feels like deja vue in an upside down world reading you once again defending DF. The upside down part being that in the mega acquisition thread we discussed thin client, and to how thin they should be, and you defended the Shield as a "thin" client and are now defending it for its " full Android tablet powered by the most powerful mobile chipset at the time" prowess, as a thick client in a comparison of "thin" clients.

10years ago the PSVita could do remote play of 720p, while cost much less, having a smaller form factor, and being far less powerful than a shield, but still a "thick" client as a system with a full blown OS and heavy mobile graphics acceleration for local play.

Three merely exposed the anti-PlayStation vibe for anything just decent that comes from Richard, even if I agree whole heartedly about the comparison with the WiiU tablet at a base level, and how retrospectively Nintendo absolutely nailed offscreen lounge streaming.

Although., where Sifu was unplayable only two or three days ago via portal (for me), and juts out of curiosity decided to rule out my router config by setting up a brand new RouterOS Mikrotik (HAP AC2) with wired PS5 and just the Portal, which was worse or no differentl.. for some odd reason, maybe a update to the PS5's networking in the UK, I can now play Sifu on Portal like it is local play, and without any issues at all, so I'm not convinced the latency is currently as high as first tests by outlets measured.

 

[mckmas8808]

Another reviewer playing the Portal in a parking lot connected to his phone's hotspot.



The Wii U comparisons are just lazy when you see the full use of this thing.

 

[Zathalus]

Industrial-strength cherry-picking - ignore almost everything else in a long-ass post and focus on the one thing that drives your narrative.

One thing? I mentioned the time difference between the two products, the latency difference, the worse functionality, and the price.

I suppose I can mention that Richard did criticize image quality, complained about frame pacing, made note of the fact that different WiFi networks would have different latencies and even threw in a Wii U comparison. But I assumed everybody read the same article.

Again, it was over a decade ago. Standards change, what was impressive 10 years ago is not necessarily impressive today. Was he harder on the Portal then he was on the Shield? Absolutely, but again a 10 year gap. The Shield was a far more impressive device in 2013 then the Portal is in 2023.

This feels like deja vue in an upside down world reading you once again defending DF. The upside down part being that in the mega acquisition thread we discussed thin client, and to how thin they should be, and you defended the Shield as a "thin" client and are now defending it for its " full Android tablet powered by the most powerful mobile chipset at the time" prowess, as a thick client in a comparison of "thin" clients.

10years ago the PSVita could do remote play of 720p, while cost much less, having a smaller form factor, and being far less powerful than a shield, but still a "thick" client as a system with a full blown OS and heavy mobile graphics acceleration for local play.

Three merely exposed the anti-PlayStation vibe for anything just decent that comes from Richard, even if I agree whole heartedly about the comparison with the WiiU tablet at a base level, and how retrospectively Nintendo absolutely nailed offscreen lounge streaming.

Although., where Sifu was unplayable only two or three days ago via portal (for me), and juts out of curiosity decided to rule out my router config by setting up a brand new RouterOS Mikrotik (HAP AC2) with wired PS5 and just the Portal, which was worse or no differentl.. for some odd reason, maybe a update to the PS5's networking in the UK, I can now play Sifu on Portal like it is local play, and without any issues at all, so I'm not convinced the latency is currently as high as first tests by outlets measured.

The Shield isn't a thin client nor is the Vita, they both run full fledged operating systems. Both are utterly outclassed by a ton of different thin client hardware. For example the PlayStation Portal is a thin client, but the hardware in it is more capable then the original Shield. A thin client is usually defined by both hardware and software. You can absolutely argue that the hardware in the Shield can be used for a thin client. If somebody were to hack the Portal and unlock Android it would cease being a thin client.

It's curious you bring up the Vita remote play as it had some issues at the beginning, it was not 720p but 540p and was limited to 30fps as well. It also had rather bad latency as first, over 100ms. Direct connection did make latency better and it took some significant updates to remote play to get better. Hopefully the Portal follows suit.

As for Richard hating PlayStation, did you read his PS5 review? He was utterly enamored with it. His PS4 Pro review was full of similar praise.

 

[Porticus]

The latency and the streaming quality between the Portal and Shield can't really be compared, you can push the second one to a crystal clear 4k/100mb in local that completely smokes the portal, moonshine can't be topped.

 

[Zathalus]

Worth pointing out that a tech powerhouse like Google with massive cloud server infrastructure wasn't able to fix latency with a dedicated streaming platform, why would you expect a $200 accessory streaming from a $400 console to magically fix what companies with ten times the resources haven't been able to?

Missed this part. Can you point out where I said latency needs to be solved? Moonlight streaming from PC to Steam Deck or a G Cloud has less latency then the Portal, on the order of two to three frames. Improving remote play is absolutely a solvable problem for Sony. As I pointed out even the Shield from 2013 can do better (in latency). It's certainly not a hardware issue but very likely the software itself. Sony can do better, hopefully they will.

 

[Zathalus]

The latency and the streaming quality between the Portal and Shield can't really be compared, you can push the second one to a crystal clear 4k/100mb in local that completely smokes the portal, moonshine can't be topped.

Talking about the OG Shield. The weird clamshell handheld. Not the Shield TV.

 

[mckmas8808]

Missed this part. Can you point out where I said latency needs to be solved? Moonlight streaming from PC to Steam Deck or a G Cloud has less latency then the Portal, on the order of two to three frames. Improving remote play is absolutely a solvable problem for Sony. As I pointed out even the Shield from 2013 can do better (in latency). It's certainly not a hardware issue but very likely the software itself. Sony can do better, hopefully they will.

Someone found out that Sony has a software limiter built into the software of the Portal. I wish I could find the tweet or video. But I think they stated that the bitrate has a built-in cap on it. This is to mainly help with using the device outside the home network.

The person's theory is maybe Sony will remove the cap if it's on the same network as the PS5, but keep the cap in place if it's on a different network.

 

[Zathalus]

Someone found out that Sony has a software limiter built into the software of the Portal. I wish I could find the tweet or video. But I think they stated that the bitrate has a built-in cap on it. This is to mainly help with using the device outside the home network.

The person's theory is maybe Sony will remove the cap if it's on the same network as the PS5, but keep the cap in place if it's on a different network.

That would be amazing. Higher bitrate will dramatically improve picture quality.

 

[Three]

Looking at that review the Shield actually has less latency then the PlayStation Portal. 50ms vs 80ms on the Portal. Imagine that, a 10 year old device streaming from a PC that is dramatically worse then a PS5 yet has less latency.

This is the problem with what you're concentrating on and don't understand. The TV to other screen difference you've set your mind on. I can tell you the latency is not better though. You think displays with their shit latency in 2013 haven't improved even more drastically to make that specific delta bigger but the latency better? You don't wonder why a PC game running at over 200fps (stated in the article) doesn't have a massive latency advantage to astrobot over remote play (100ms vs 104ms)? You don't think that possibly the screen latency delta is limited by the display latency they had back then and is not indicative of how well the wireless tech is performing? sometimes people were measuring a negative delta and not even understanding why. The fact that the display model wasn't even mentioned tells me it didn't even cross his or your mind.

What encoding hardware does the PS5 have anyway for remote play, do you even know what it is? I would think an 4.3ghz i7 is no slouch even by todays console standards, that PC is also running a game at over 200fps for low latency and still ending up with 100ms overall. what's "dramatically worse" than PS5 there when you're ignoring the important metric for latency? Let's say for the sake of argument whatever hardware PS5 is using is dramatically better as you say, still you're concentrating on the wrong thing to measure latency difference. It's like measuring the time for 2 async tasks then comparing the time delta between the two tasks and assuming that because that's small the overall time must be better than todays hardware. Yet nobody seems to see the flaw in this logic.

That's what's so stupid about the Wii U comparisons too. They're usually measures of TV vs screen comparisons on the Wii U. The Wii U even prioritised the Wii U gamepad screen because it was used for touchscreen interaction on that display and designed to be in sync with the TV output often at the cost of latency to the TV. In reality latency had regressed on Wii U. Wii U VC had 4 frames of latency compared to Wii VC, people constantly complained about Wii U latency and trying to disable the gamepad screen. Yet tech sites like DF never thought let me test latency in Injustice gods among us on a Wii U gamepad vs Injustice on PS4 remote play and see, see if their proprietary 802.11n is better than the 802.11ax of today (it probably isn't) or at least do a like for like TV screen vs TV screen test. They concentrated on what the same console was outputting to the TV vs the gamepad and considered that "low latency" even though overall they could be experiencing something worse. He tested PS Portal on one of the best TVs with a lowly 13ms lag. Meaning the TV difference was likely massive at 60ms but the overall latency would be 73ms, thats better than 100ms with a game running at "over 200fps".

Its even funnier when you complain about the price. The shield is a 10 year old handheld that can still do more then the Portal can. It was a full Android tablet powered by the most powerful mobile chipset at the time and was among the first dedicated PC streaming devices. No wonder Richard was impressed in 2013. Most people were.It been 10 years, most people would rightly expect a bigger leap in streaming performance. Not a regression in latency.

That's great and all but considering when it launched at $299 you could buy a complete console for that price it was a big asking price for an android "tablet" (a 5inch screen isn't exactly a tablet but whatever). $299 had a lot more value than $200 now, it wasn't a good deal in my eyes but I still had it. if people wanted to pay $299 to play mobile games on another device other than their phone then great, to each his own I'm not going to tell them otherwise but that device was expensive for what it offered no matter how you look at it. The streaming was utter shit too. 7mb bitrate on h264 meaning it was more comparable to 3.5mb on HEVC, it turned a 200fps source into 30fps on a tiny screen with macroblocking and image degradation. Yet these were all not to be concerned about when talking about streaming PC games because the ergonomics of the zero compromise controller, simplicity of the connection, and the benefits of using a wifi router were the overall positive tone of the article when it came to streaming. Not anymore I guess. Now it's why does sony rely on the wifi standard, why does it not rely on the bluetooth standard, look at this colour banding, look at the "expensive" subscription you can't use, blah blah blah.

 

[SlimySnake]

Just tried the remote play at my brothers house. definitely not as responsive as it is at home, but i was testing the 30 fps mode. The picture quality was pretty much identical though. Only had time to test wifi.

This thing will definitely work even if you are not home.

P.S Since the PS5 is the one doing the heavy lifting, i wonder if upload speeds matter too.

 

[Zathalus]

This is the problem with what you're concentrating on and don't understand. The TV to other screen difference you've set your mind on. I can tell you the latency is not better though. You think displays with their shit latency in 2013 haven't improved even more drastically to make that specific delta bigger but the latency better? You don't wonder why a PC game running at over 200fps (stated in the article) doesn't have a massive latency advantage to astrobot over remote play (100ms vs 104ms)? You don't think that possibly the screen latency delta is limited by the display latency they had back then and is not indicative of how well the wireless tech is performing? sometimes people were measuring a negative delta and not even understanding why. The fact that the display model wasn't even mentioned tells me it didn't even cross his or your mind.

What encoding hardware does the PS5 have anyway for remote play, do you even know what it is? I would think an 4.3ghz i7 is no slouch even by todays console standards, that PC is also running a game at over 200fps for low latency and still ending up with 100ms overall. what's "dramatically worse" than PS5 there when you're ignoring the important metric for latency? Let's say for the sake of argument whatever hardware PS5 is using is dramatically better as you say, still you're concentrating on the wrong thing to measure latency difference. It's like measuring the time for 2 async tasks then comparing the time delta between the two tasks and assuming that because that's small the overall time must be better than todays hardware. Yet nobody seems to see the flaw in this logic.

That's what's so stupid about the Wii U comparisons too. They're usually measures of TV vs screen comparisons on the Wii U. The Wii U even prioritised the Wii U gamepad screen because it was used for touchscreen interaction on that display and designed to be in sync with the TV output often at the cost of latency to the TV. In reality latency had regressed on Wii U. Wii U VC had 4 frames of latency compared to Wii VC, people constantly complained about Wii U latency and trying to disable the gamepad screen. Yet tech sites like DF never thought let me test latency in Injustice gods among us on a Wii U gamepad vs Injustice on PS4 remote play and see, see if their proprietary 802.11n is better than the 802.11ax of today (it probably isn't) or at least do a like for like TV screen vs TV screen test. They concentrated on what the same console was outputting to the TV vs the gamepad and considered that "low latency" even though overall they could be experiencing something worse. He tested PS Portal on one of the best TVs with a lowly 13ms lag. Meaning the TV difference was likely massive at 60ms but the overall latency would be 73ms, thats better than 100ms with a game running at "over 200fps".

That's great and all but considering when it launched at $299 you could buy a complete console for that price it was a big asking price for an android "tablet" (a 5inch screen isn't exactly a tablet but whatever). $299 had a lot more value than $200 now, it wasn't a good deal in my eyes but I still had it. if people wanted to pay $299 to play mobile games on another device other than their phone then great, to each his own I'm not going to tell them otherwise but that device was expensive for what it offered no matter how you look at it. The streaming was utter shit too. 7mb bitrate on h264 meaning it was more comparable to 3.5mb on HEVC, it turned a 200fps source into 30fps on a tiny screen with macroblocking and image degradation. Yet these were all not to be concerned about when talking about streaming PC games because the ergonomics of the zero compromise controller, simplicity of the connection, and the benefits of using a wifi router were the overall positive tone of the article when it came to streaming. Not anymore I guess. Now it's why does sony rely on the wifi standard, why does it not rely on the bluetooth standard, look at this colour banding, look at the "expensive" subscription you can't use, blah blah blah.

1. When testing they used a high speed camera.
2. The game was locked to 60 fps on PC.
3. Encoding is done by the GPU and not the CPU. Both Nvidia and AMD have dedicated media blocks for this. RDNA2 is vastly superior to Kepler in this regard. That's what I mean by dramatic.
4. The Shield round trip is 100ms, so 1 fps worse compared to portal. I read the 50ms split incorrectly.
5. Still being better then a 10 year old device should be a given, but streaming quality and latency are not as good as competing solutions.

 

[Three]

1. When testing they used a high speed camera.

Ok? Of course they did. To record input and compare to a display. Their "high speed" was a crap 60fps camera

2. The game was locked to 60 fps on PC.

No, you've misread. it was 200fps on the PC and a 60fps camera to measure input timing latency against the unknown display:

" so we capture both running simultaneously and use a high-speed 60fps camera to record our control inputs, with both PC and Shield displays in-shot. Our game of choice is BioShock Infinite, running on PC with a Core i7 at 4.3GHz and a GTX 670 graphics card. Frame-rate is initially unlocked, with FRAPS indicating that the game is running at over 200 frames per second."

They set vsync 60 only to try and reduce stutter but that had nothing to do with their latency measurements prior.

3. Encoding is done by the GPU and not the CPU. Both Nvidia and AMD have dedicated media blocks for this. RDNA2 is vastly superior to Kepler in this regard. That's what I mean by dramatic.

Fair enough. you're right, kepler had just introduced it so it wasn't reliant on the CPU like the CUDA encoder.

4. The Shield round trip is 100ms, so 1 fps worse compared to portal. I read the 50ms split incorrectly.

Glad you see that PS portal is better for latency now.

5. Still being better then a 10 year old device should be a given

That's some goalpost moving if I ever saw one when you were just suggesting it somehow wasn't.

 

[demigod]

That would be amazing. Higher bitrate will dramatically improve picture quality.

Bro out here still talking about bitrate. I bet you never messed with it.

Like I said, Chiaki sucks ass for me. This is running wifi on the PS5. Changing the bitrate higher than 15,000 just makes it worse. Look at all those screenshots of the glitches that I took on the Steam Deck. Not to mention the audio has static as well. This is just me spamming 2 buttons and holding my iphone. It gets worse when I use the 2 buttons along with dpad.

I’ve never seen it glitch like this on the Portal. There are at times that it slows down due to the Ps5 being on wifi, but NEVER a glitch.

I’m going to try it tomorrow when I pick up my son at school and see how it holds with T-mobile hotspot.

HeisenbergFX4 this is on a Asus GTAXE16000, i hate you fam.

 

[Jesb]

no PS4 support sucks. I would’ve got it.

 

[Zathalus]

Ok? Of course they did. To record input and compare to a display. Their "high speed" was a crap 60fps camera

No, you've misread. it was 200fps on the PC and a 60fps camera to measure input timing latency against the unknown display:

" so we capture both running simultaneously and use a high-speed 60fps camera to record our control inputs, with both PC and Shield displays in-shot. Our game of choice is BioShock Infinite, running on PC with a Core i7 at 4.3GHz and a GTX 670 graphics card. Frame-rate is initially unlocked, with FRAPS indicating that the game is running at over 200 frames per second."

They set vsync 60 only to try and reduce stutter but that had nothing to do with their latency measurements prior.

Fair enough. you're right, kepler had just introduced it so it wasn't reliant on the CPU like the CUDA encoder.

Glad you see that PS portal is better for latency now.

That's some goalpost moving if I ever saw one when you were just suggesting it somehow wasn't.

They tested both uncapped and with a 60fps Vsync.

Turning on v-sync in-game, and capping frame-rate to 60fps gives an identical response on both legs of the journey.

No change in observed network latency. And I mentioned before being better then a 10 year old device should be a given. My mind has changed from 'oh its worse then a 10 year old device that really sucks' to 'its still a bit worse then competing streaming solutions, that still sucks (but obviously not as much as before)'.

I haven't hidden my feelings about the Portal at all, I really like mine I just wish Sony would have done some effort with remote play itself.

I just find it silly to point to a decade old article and claim why someone is not as impressed as they were with one of the first streaming handhelds.

Bro out here still talking about bitrate. I bet you never messed with it.

Like I said, Chiaki sucks ass for me. This is running wifi on the PS5. Changing the bitrate higher than 15,000 just makes it worse. Look at all those screenshots of the glitches that I took on the Steam Deck. Not to mention the audio has static as well. This is just me spamming 2 buttons and holding my iphone. It gets worse when I use the 2 buttons along with dpad.

I’ve never seen it glitch like this on the Portal. There are at times that it slows down due to the Ps5 being on wifi, but NEVER a glitch.

I’m going to try it tomorrow when I pick up my son at school and see how it holds with T-mobile hotspot.

HeisenbergFX4 this is on a Asus GTAXE16000, i hate you fam.

Oh course I know what bitrate is, I literally mentioned Moonlight in this very thread. I also own a Steam Deck and Shield TV and have extensively used Geforce NOW with which you can push to bitrate up to 100Mbps which makes for a fantastic image.

Using Chiaki to push bitrate above 15mbps likely cause issues because remote play itself is limited to 15Mbps. Pushing bitrate up on Moonlight/Sunshine or with Nvidia cause no issues at all, as long as your network is good enough.

Like I said, Sony should improve it. PS4 being limited as that used the crappy media engine from GCN (VCE) is likely but PS5 should be using either VCN 2 or 3 which is far more capable.

 

[Brutal Deluxe]

Have Sony mentioned if there will be a new batch of stock before christmas (UK)?

 

[Ogbert]

100%! No frills, no gotcha BS, just old school testing with constant data methods. At this point it's all about the quality of your connection. His video clearly shows that you should want or need at least 25 MB of download speed. I'm not sure how DF dropped the ball here.

DF haven’t dropped the ball at all. They raised perfectly
valid points. I got the Portal on day 1 and it’s been sat on the shelf for a week or so. It is underwhelming.

That your fundamental experience is determined by your connection speed is not good enough for a company as ubiquitous as Sony. You would expect them to deliver a product that is uniform for all. Or, at the very least, reaches a baseline that is uniform for all. It’s all very well linking to videos of strong performance at certain hot spots. But it can be just as easily countered with dubious performance elsewhere.

I live in London. Have the best internet that BT can provide, but I still get the ever so faint feeing of sluggishness when playing. Having spent the last five or so years playing on Switch and Steam deck, it just doesn’t quite cut it.

As a result, it’s a strange proposition. There’s no situation in which I would rather play on the Portal.

 

[PaintTinJr]

...


The Shield isn't a thin client nor is the Vita, they both run full fledged operating systems. Both are utterly outclassed by a ton of different thin client hardware. For example the PlayStation Portal is a thin client, but the hardware in it is more capable then the original Shield. A thin client is usually defined by both hardware and software. You can absolutely argue that the hardware in the Shield can be used for a thin client. If somebody were to hack the Portal and unlock Android it would cease being a thin client.

It's curious you bring up the Vita remote play as it had some issues at the beginning, it was not 720p but 540p and was limited to 30fps as well. It also had rather bad latency as first, over 100ms. Direct connection did make latency better and it took some significant updates to remote play to get better. Hopefully the Portal follows suit.

As for Richard hating PlayStation, did you read his PS5 review? He was utterly enamored with it. His PS4 Pro review was full of similar praise.

Have you got any reference for that claim? Based on the Portal being about the same weight as a DualSense - because the controls have been made lighter on the Portal, so I have a hard time believing that PlayStation designers wasted much silicon on thick client capabilities, on a "thin" client console when ASICs that aren't suited to general purpose thick client use are more power efficient and performant, make the device lighter to maximize screen time and screen brightness.

Other than being a framebuffer device with a decoder - when receiving a stream - what other hardware capabilities are you claiming it has? Are you suggesting it has specific GPU hardware acceleration and lots of RAM for use beyond its primary streaming sales pitch?

As for the 540p claim. that is just the native display resolution of the PSVita and if you checked the specific wording I used in my post - anticipating the QHD comment - you'd see I wasn't talking about that. The games on the PS3 render at 720p, and AFAIK are encoded and streamed to the Vita as-is, with the Vita GPU doing the downsampling for the native resolution, given that it adds processing latency to downsample at the PS3 end. The visuals between the two devices would be aliased different if it was being resampled on the PS3 first, rather than just downsampled in the Vita GPU decoding pipeline IMO, as the PS Vita has an ASIC Scaler for displaying HD as QHD IIRC.

 

[Zathalus]

Have you got any reference for that claim? Based on the Portal being about the same weight as a DualSense - because the controls have been made lighter on the Portal, so I have a hard time believing that PlayStation designers wasted much silicon on thick client capabilities, on a "thin" client console when ASICs that aren't suited to general purpose thick client use are more power efficient and performant, make the device lighter to maximize screen time and screen brightness.

Other than being a framebuffer device with a decoder - when receiving a stream - what other hardware capabilities are you claiming it has? Are you suggesting it has specific GPU hardware acceleration and lots of RAM for use beyond its primary streaming sales pitch?

As for the 540p claim. that is just the native display resolution of the PSVita and if you checked the specific wording I used in my post - anticipating the QHD comment - you'd see I wasn't talking about that. The games on the PS3 render at 720p, and AFAIK are encoded and streamed to the Vita as-is, with the Vita GPU doing the downsampling for the native resolution, given that it adds processing latency to downsample at the PS3 end. The visuals between the two devices would be aliased different if it was being resampled on the PS3 first, rather than just downsampled in the Vita GPU decoding pipeline IMO, as the PS Vita has an ASIC Scaler for displaying HD as QHD IIRC.

The Portal uses a Snapdragon 680:

PlayStation Portal OS Source Code Confirms the System's Snapdragon CPU

Sony released this week the PlayStation Portal OS source code online, which reveals conflicting information regarding the CPU

wccftech.com

Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G Processor - Benchmarks and Specs

Benchmarks, information, and specifications for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G

www.notebookcheck.net

That's a 8 core processor at 2.4/1.9Ghz with 4GB RAM and a dedicated GPU. It's been used in quite a number of mobile phones. Since the Portal runs Android, it needs some grunt to power it. Blows the old Tegra 4 out of the water. Hecks it's more powerful then Switch when looking at the CPU, but a weaker GPU though.

As for the Vita I was just going off what I recall about using it to stream PS4 content where it initially had some issues.

 

[PaintTinJr]

The Portal uses a Snapdragon 680:

PlayStation Portal OS Source Code Confirms the System's Snapdragon CPU

Sony released this week the PlayStation Portal OS source code online, which reveals conflicting information regarding the CPU

wccftech.com

Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G Processor - Benchmarks and Specs

Benchmarks, information, and specifications for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G

www.notebookcheck.net

That's a 8 core processor at 2.4/1.9Ghz with 4GB RAM and a dedicated GPU. It's been used in quite a number of mobile phones. Since the Portal runs Android, it needs some grunt to power it. Blows the old Tegra 4 out of the water. Hecks it's more powerful then Switch when looking at the CPU, but a weaker GPU though.

As for the Vita I was just going off what I recall about using it to stream PS4 content where it initially had some issues.

But that makes no reference to the GPU use by Portal in that chipset, so it is just the CPU of an old weaker smartphone chipset the software claims to use.

That CPU is weaker - for general purpose thick client computing - than a 2.4Ghz clocked RPi4B, which itself is way below the "thin" client requirements for Geforce Now, Gamepass xcloud and all the other streaming game services in the market, supporting the argument that the portal is a "thin" client in hardware terms based on the requirements for streaming.

The single 2.4Ghz core is still quite a low clock for a thin client, and such a workload as game streaming isn't suited to homogeneous symmetrical multicore processing anyway, to use the weaker 1.9ghz cores with even divisions of work. Those other cores are either going to be unused or used for ASIC type processing to supplement the weak general purpose main core.

Suggesting it is more powerful than the Shield or the Switch, just doesn't stack up IMO. The portal has all the signs of being a CPU based thin client device in context of today's gaming, and those others are thick/thicker clients IMO.

 

[Three]

They tested both uncapped and with a 60fps Vsync. No change in observed network latency.

I suspect that's because of digital foundry's sloppy 16ms sampling rate but that's interesting they didn't observe anything and didn't question why with a higher framerate they didn't observe it. That should have been a given. You can't sample 200fps data with 60fps data sampling equipment (camera), schoolboy DF error there.

And I mentioned before being better then a 10 year old device should be a given. My mind has changed from 'oh its worse then a 10 year old device that really sucks' to 'its still a bit worse then competing streaming solutions, that still sucks (but obviously not as much as before)'.
I haven't hidden my feelings about the Portal at all, I really like mine I just wish Sony would have done some effort with remote play itself.
I just find it silly to point to a decade old article and claim why someone is not as impressed as they were with one of the first streaming handhelds.

And it is better than the 10 year old device but the conversation started with you saying it's worse and me just clarifying that it isn't. I'm glad that your opinion has changed regarding that but what you're going into now is a complete tangent. the fact that you expected encoding to improve on the PS5 hardware with a release of a thin client isn’t relevant to my view of how I think the tone of Richard has completely changed here in comparison, when before he was praising far worse experiences. A stuttering 30fps mess, streaming locally on a wifi router device with bad latency, macroblocking at a 3.5mb equivalent bitrate on a crap 5 inch display, calling it a PC portable and explicitly stating use of wifi is better than the then available Wii U. This was worse than Gaiki and Onlive at the time too. He concentrated on how it was wifi so better than Wii U yet somehow praised latency there, the controller design being up his ally, and a PC in your hands regardless of streaming quality being far worse and not great.

What you're discussing now about alternatively using an entirely different platform (PC) wasn't even really highlighted in his Portal review. instead he went back to a Wii U comparison and this time changing his mind about the wifi benefits he highlighted on the shield review. Concentrated on how "as a streamer it means you're going to get extra lag and image quality compromises", I mean that's obvious as with all streaming, he didn't even really test those in terms of encoding and bandwidth requirements. Nor did he compare latency other than again to the Wii U. yet the even worse latency didn't suck on shield to highlight that as negatively or as extensively, even saying Shield is comparable to local play despite it being worse. Nor did he do this on his steam link review to make Wii U comparison.

Had he discussed the PS5 encoder chip and its capabilities at least it would have been informative (though I don't see why if any better encoding capability was there it wouldn't have happened without this Portal release). Had he highlighted image quality differences in alternative streaming from PC that too would have been at least somewhat informative to me, though I'm not sure how useful it would have been for those who want their existing platform, the PS5 in the palm of their hand. Instead he waffled on about how streaming in general adds lag and went back to a Wii U comparison for that which now weirdly really favoured Wii U when it didn't that much on the shield that had even worse lag than the 3.

Had he actually got technical this would have been good but he waffled on complaining about downright stupid things like the uncertainty of wifi, wii U latency, emulation and general negative bullshit about how 'expensive' premium is. Had he highlighted encoding differences that you seem to be going on a tangent on, I wouldn't have highlighted any negative tone here compared to the past. It would have just been data. We touched on Kepler vs RDNA 2 but we don't actually know what the encoder on PS5 is. Kepler was encoding 30fps/720p, PS5 is encoding 60fps/1080p/HDR and we don't know if the PS5 encoder is capable of more. would dropping to shield framerate and res mprove latency due to encoding time, by how much? We don't have a clue but that's not related to Portal so I'm not sure why you were expecting changes to those. You also keep mentioning bitrate. Have you compared nvidias HEVC encoding to remote play HEVC encoding. Is it even any different? Is it actually any better in IQ in terms of macroblocking or colour banding for a given res and framerate or does setting 100mbs max encoding only benefit >1080p>60fps because that requires that sort of bitrate at 120fps4k . I've seen people complain of colour banding on Geforce now. 120fps4k encoding is something the PS5 wouldn't even be able to do regardless of the Portal release thus making any complaints about the bitrate a dumb thing to complain about if it's the max it needs to get identical IQ at that lower framerate and res. There were no discussion about any of this from Richard so I'm not sure where you're going with this.

 

[Zathalus]

But that makes no reference to the GPU use by Portal in that chipset, so it is just the CPU of an old weaker smartphone chipset the software claims to use.

That CPU is weaker - for general purpose thick client computing - than a 2.4Ghz clocked RPi4B, which itself is way below the "thin" client requirements for Geforce Now, Gamepass xcloud and all the other streaming game services in the market, supporting the argument that the portal is a "thin" client in hardware terms based on the requirements for streaming.

The single 2.4Ghz core is still quite a low clock for a thin client, and such a workload as game streaming isn't suited to homogeneous symmetrical multicore processing anyway, to use the weaker 1.9ghz cores with even divisions of work. Those other cores are either going to be unused or used for ASIC type processing to supplement the weak general purpose main core.

Suggesting it is more powerful than the Shield or the Switch, just doesn't stack up IMO. The portal has all the signs of being a CPU based thin client device in context of today's gaming, and those others are thick/thicker clients IMO.

Did you not read the spec sheet?

Snapdragon 680:

CPU - Quad Core Cortex-A73 2.4Ghz + Quad Core Cortex A53 1.8Ghz
RAM - 4GB Dual Channel LPDDR4
GPU - Qualcomm Adreno 610 - 312 GFLOPs FP32

Tegra 4:

CPU - Quad Core Cortex-A15 1.9Ghz
RAM - 2GB DDR3L
GPU - Tegra 4 - 74.8 GLOPs FP32

We even have benchmarks for both:

Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G Processor - Benchmarks and Specs

Benchmarks, information, and specifications for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G

www.notebookcheck.net

NVIDIA Tegra 4 Notebook Processor

Benchmarks, informatie en specificaties voor de NVIDIA Tegra 4 laptop processor (CPU).

www.notebookcheck.nl

As you can clearly see, the 680 is more then twice as fast (Geekbench 4.4). Which makes sense, it's about 8 years newer.

And no, the Raspberry Pi 4B is not more powerful, it's a older Cortex-A72 quad core that is clocked lower with a vastly weaker GPU.

I'm not speculating and there is nothing to add up, we literally have the specifications of both devices. There is no guessing what the Portal is capable of we know exactly what it is using, its been used in dozens of smartphones and tablets already.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Missed this part. Can you point out where I said latency needs to be solved?

Just re-read your own post...

It been 10 years, most people would rightly expect a bigger leap in streaming performance. Not a regression in latency.

Stadia had latency, PS Now had latency, XCloud has latency. People expecting a 'bigger leap' from a console accessory than Google was able to deliver with an entire platform are not doing so 'rightly'.

 

[Zathalus]

Just re-read your own post...

Stadia had latency, PS Now had latency, XCloud has latency. People expecting a 'bigger leap' from a console accessory than Google was able to deliver with an entire platform are not doing so 'rightly'.

Bigger leap =/= no latency. Simply bring it down to around 33ms on a local network. It's possible as Moonlight and Parsec can do it.

 

[consoul]

That your fundamental experience is determined by your connection speed is not good enough for a company as ubiquitous as Sony.

It's a wi-fi remote play device! Of course the experience is determined by connection speed.

My fundamental experience of driving a Civic on a bumpy road peppered with potholes was not good enough. I expect more from a company as ubiquitous as Honda.

 

[Ogbert]

It's a wi-fi remote play device! Of course the experience is determined by connection speed.

My fundamental experience of driving a Civic on a bumpy road peppered with potholes was not good enough. I expect more from a company as ubiquitous as Honda.

Sure.

But you’re missing the point DF are making. When you are as trusted as Sony, perhaps a streaming device isn’t a suitable avenue for them.

It’s not a criticism of the product. It’s a criticism of their choice of product.

And by the way, Honda would design a car that can deal with all but the most egregious of potholes.

 

[SlimySnake]

It’s not a criticism of the product. It’s a criticism of their choice of product.

Then dont review the product.

A review is supposed to be a criticism of a product. Not a criticism of a company's decision making.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Did you not read the spec sheet?

Snapdragon 680:

CPU - Quad Core Cortex-A73 2.4Ghz + Quad Core Cortex A53 1.8Ghz
RAM - 4GB Dual Channel LPDDR4
GPU - Qualcomm Adreno 610 - 312 GFLOPs FP32

Tegra 4:

CPU - Quad Core Cortex-A15 1.9Ghz
RAM - 2GB DDR3L
GPU - Tegra 4 - 74.8 GLOPs FP32

We even have benchmarks for both:

Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G Processor - Benchmarks and Specs

Benchmarks, information, and specifications for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G

www.notebookcheck.net

NVIDIA Tegra 4 Notebook Processor

Benchmarks, informatie en specificaties voor de NVIDIA Tegra 4 laptop processor (CPU).

www.notebookcheck.nl

As you can clearly see, the 680 is more then twice as fast (Geekbench 4.4). Which makes sense, it's about 8 years newer.

And no, the Raspberry Pi 4B is not more powerful, it's a older Cortex-A72 quad core that is clocked lower with a vastly weaker GPU.

I'm not speculating and there is nothing to add up, we literally have the specifications of both devices. There is no guessing what the Portal is capable of we know exactly what it is using, its been used in dozens of smartphones and tablets already.

The Snapdragon's main performance is in it GPU, and yes, when you clock a RPI4B to the same CPU core clock, as is now a default clock on the latest firmware it will outperform that snapdragon CPU in the Portal, and the RPI4B is too weak for your game streaming services because they all need thick client GPUs to do the heavy lifting.

The link you gave only talks about the Portal firmware using the CPU of that chip, so benchmarks of the GPU are nonsense without proof the portal even uses the GPU for anything more than basic decoding and basic framebuffer rendering.

 

[Zathalus]

The Snapdragon's main performance is in it GPU, and yes, when you clock a RPI4B to the same CPU core clock, as is now a default clock on the latest firmware it will outperform that snapdragon CPU in the Portal, and the RPI4B is too weak for your game streaming services because they all need thick client GPUs to do the heavy lifting.

The link you gave only talks about the Portal firmware using the CPU of that chip, so benchmarks of the GPU are nonsense without proof the portal even uses the GPU for anything more than basic decoding and basic framebuffer rendering.

I never claimed it uses the GPU for anything other then decoding. But if somebody was to jailbreak the device it will be capable enough to run Android and even some Android games or emulation. Call of Duty mobile and Fortnite both work well enough on it. The hardware is there after all. The GPU and CPU are integrated onto the 680 SoC, you can't have a Snapdragon 680 without a working GPU.

As for the CPU the primary cluster is a Cortex-A73 quad core setup, the Raspberry Pi 4B is Cortex-A72 which is the previous years model from ARM so it will be slightly slower, even at the same clock speeds. The Snapdragon then has the entire other quad core cluster as well.

The SoC in the Logitech G Cloud is also quite powerful, it's the Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G, so this isn't unusual.

 

[FrankWza]

Then dont review the product.

A review is supposed to be a criticism of a product. Not a criticism of a company's decision making.

Sometimes a response is so perfect that it makes all the arguments in this thread moot and really explains what the issue is with this review. This is one of those times.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

It's been over a day since I've said how much I love this device, so here I am!!!!
I realized the other day, that I've already used my Portal more that I've used by $150 Series S (Verizon Deal), and that was like a year ago.
I've been getting a lot more game time in. I'm almost done with FF7R when I thought I'd barely be able to finish it before Rebirth.
Now I'm even considering playing Ever Crisis before Rebirth releases. That would have never been a consideration if I only had man cave gaming time.

 

[FrankWza]

It's been over a day since I've said how much I love this device, so here I am!!!!
I realized the other day, that I've already used my Portal more that I've used by $150 Series S (Verizon Deal), and that was like a year ago.
I've been getting a lot more game time in. I'm almost done with FF7R when I thought I'd barely be able to finish it before Rebirth.
Now I'm even considering playing Ever Crisis before Rebirth releases. That would have never been a consideration if I only had man cave gaming time.

I saw how some people with stutter issues had big improvements with the patch. Did you have any issues and or see improvements?

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

I saw how some people with stutter issues had big improvements with the patch. Did you have any issues and or see improvements?

I haven't had many stuttering issues, usually just a 1 sec stutter every 10-20 min. I didn't know it got another patch. I haven't updated it since Day 1. I'll have to update.

 

[playtillyadrop]

Bro out here still talking about bitrate. I bet you never messed with it.

Like I said, Chiaki sucks ass for me. This is running wifi on the PS5. Changing the bitrate higher than 15,000 just makes it worse. Look at all those screenshots of the glitches that I took on the Steam Deck. Not to mention the audio has static as well. This is just me spamming 2 buttons and holding my iphone. It gets worse when I use the 2 buttons along with dpad.

I’ve never seen it glitch like this on the Portal. There are at times that it slows down due to the Ps5 being on wifi, but NEVER a glitch.

I’m going to try it tomorrow when I pick up my son at school and see how it holds with T-mobile hotspot.

HeisenbergFX4 this is on a Asus GTAXE16000, i hate you fam.

I hope this was post was suppose to be a joke. If not change your settings hardware decode method should be vaapi. set it to 1080p and use bitrate of 20000, and audio rate of 15000, and uncheck speech processing. Chiaki4deck works pefect for me.

 

[SlimySnake]

It's been over a day since I've said how much I love this device, so here I am!!!!
I realized the other day, that I've already used my Portal more that I've used by $150 Series S (Verizon Deal), and that was like a year ago.
I've been getting a lot more game time in. I'm almost done with FF7R when I thought I'd barely be able to finish it before Rebirth.
Now I'm even considering playing Ever Crisis before Rebirth releases. That would have never been a consideration if I only had man cave gaming time.

lol i bought the series s from that deal too. but it was for my son and he never played it so i traded it in and told him id buy him a portal instead. got a cool $192 for it a couple of months ago.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

lol i bought the series s from that deal too. but it was for my son and he never played it so i traded it in and told him id buy him a portal instead. got a cool $192 for it a couple of months ago.

So far I've just been buying some xbox classics when they're cheap. I bought fable 2 and MCC for $20 total. I have Gears 4 from having it on PC. But that's about it other than some games they gave out like Crackdown. I plan to play some of the classic stuff but it's down in my backlog. I also can't believe how loud and clicky the directional pad is everytime I use that controller. Everything I think it's a joke or something. haha

For me it was basically a $150 insurance policy, so I can play whatever one off games from Xbox I wanna play on console. No new games have convinced me yet.

 

[Heisenberg007]

Sure.

But you’re missing the point DF are making. When you are as trusted as Sony, perhaps a streaming device isn’t a suitable avenue for them.

It’s not a criticism of the product. It’s a criticism of their choice of product.

And by the way, Honda would design a car that can deal with all but the most egregious of potholes.

You're in a thread that literally says that Portal has sold out 2 days after launch. Sony said that they can restock only in December, which means Portal's sales has exceeded even Sony's expectations and inventory forecasts.

At this point, the "criticism of the choice of product" is a completely invalid argument.

The market has spoken. No matter what someone's personal feelings may be about it, it does not matter in the grand scheme of things and cannot be used as an argument in general.

 

[FrankWza]

You're in a thread that literally says that Portal has sold out 2 days after launch. Sony said that they can restock only in December, which means Portal's sales has exceeded even Sony's expectations and inventory forecasts.

At this point, the "criticism of the choice of product" is a completely invalid argument.

The market has spoken. No matter what someone's personal feelings may be about it, it does not matter in the grand scheme of things and cannot be used as an argument in general.

DOA didn't happen so they had to pivot.

 

[mayham2199]

Was finally able to grab one from Best Buy. Should arrive next week which is a week before my vacation which is nice. Had to setup an alert system to monitor the best buy "add to cart" button for changes. Worked for my PS5 purchases and just worked again love this chrome addin.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

Was finally able to grab one from Best Buy. Should arrive next week which is a week before my vacation which is nice. Had to setup an alert system to monitor the best buy "add to cart" button for changes. Worked for my PS5 purchases and just worked again love this chrome addin.

 

[SlimySnake]

Tom Warren with quality journalism.

 

[TransTrender]

Was finally able to grab one from Best Buy. Should arrive next week which is a week before my vacation which is nice. Had to setup an alert system to monitor the best buy "add to cart" button for changes. Worked for my PS5 purchases and just worked again love this chrome addin.

Damn I was randomly fucking around on the Best Buy website looking at something else and saw the Portal popped up, but I needed to re-verify my account and in the 30 seconds or so that took it went OOS in the area when three stores were showing 'something' was there.

 

[HeisenbergFX4]

Damn I was randomly fucking around on the Best Buy website looking at something else and saw the Portal popped up, but I needed to re-verify my account and in the 30 seconds or so that took it went OOS in the area when three stores were showing 'something' was there.

They keep coming in and out of stock often just have to be lucky to check when there are in

 

[demigod]

I hope this was post was suppose to be a joke. If not change your settings hardware decode method should be vaapi. set it to 1080p and use bitrate of 20000, and audio rate of 15000, and uncheck speech processing. Chiaki4deck works pefect for me.

Joke post huh, I’ve already tried 1080p before turning it down to 720p. Your settings made everything worse. I tried 2 battles, the 1st one glitched as usual. The 2nd battle was pretty much all green. Let me rephrase it, my PS5 is on wifi and not hard wired.

I like how you logged into an alt with a fail “gotcha”.

 

[Ogbert]

You're in a thread that literally says that Portal has sold out 2 days after launch. Sony said that they can restock only in December, which means Portal's sales has exceeded even Sony's expectations and inventory forecasts.

At this point, the "criticism of the choice of product" is a completely invalid argument.

The market has spoken. No matter what someone's personal feelings may be about it, it does not matter in the grand scheme of things and cannot be used as an argument in general.

Not sure why you’re all so sensitive about this product.

I was one of the people that bought it on day one. I just think it’s underwhelming and, having spent a couple of weeks with it, the criticisms about the choices Sony have made are entirely valid.

 

[demigod]

Sure.

But you’re missing the point DF are making. When you are as trusted as Sony, perhaps a streaming device isn’t a suitable avenue for them.

It’s not a criticism of the product. It’s a criticism of their choice of product.

And by the way, Honda would design a car that can deal with all but the most egregious of potholes.

Please tell Toyota to make a diesel truck in the USA, thanks.