DF Direct Weekly: is a handheld Remote Play streamer for PS5 a good idea?

DF Direct Weekly goes live a day early this week, not because of any particular urge to liven up your holiday weekend (assuming you have one) but rather to make way for a raft of embargoed content we're expecting to deliver next week. In this week's show, I'm joined by my #FriendAndColleagues John Linneman and Oliver Mackenzie, with the main points of discussion covering off mooted rumours of a PlayStation handheld based on Remote Play, the not-an-April-Fool-after-all Asus ROG Ally - and to express a degree of disappointment that Microsoft has banned access to emulation for Xbox Series consoles.

Let's tackle the PlayStation handheld story first of all. It's worth pointing out that Sony has made no official confirmation, and we're talking about a rumour here - but an interesting one nonetheless. First of all, the idea is that this would be a relatively cheap device, tapping into the PS5's local streaming capabilities as opposed to some kind of Steam Deck-like device, built around local gaming and using a low-power AMD SoC. From a Digital Foundry perspective, the latter option is certainly more interesting and from a viability perspective, there's much to commend it - assuming that Sony were to tap into the latest 4nm process technology. Perhaps not coincidentally, that's exactly what the Asus ROG Ally does.

The streaming idea is far less ambitious but would deliver a far cheaper device - and would also ensure that development resources are not split between two machines. Sony could choose practically any decent mobile processor, as hardware decoding of the video compression standards used by the PlayStation 5 comes as standard on practically any low-power chip. It would effectively be a dumb terminal, connected to the PS5 via WiFi and streaming from there. This does rely on Remote Play being performant, however, and so before filming the Direct, I set up Remote Play on my PC, with both computer and console wired to my router. This eliminates all WiFi lag but unfortunately the experience still didn't hold up. Based on my testing with Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, the 1080p60 stream was compromised with obvious macroblocking (network traffic was just 8Mbps), skipped frames and noticeable latency. It was functional, but not impressive.

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