The rumored PlayStation 5 handheld will unlikely be able to play PS5 games natively and will probably require dedicated versions of new games.
Commenting on the recent rumors regarding Sony’s return to the handheld market following the PS Vita, the tech experts at Digital Foundry made some interesting observations on what the systems could actually be, highlighting how it will not be able to run PlayStation 5 games natively, as what is currently achieved on a 200 watts system will be impossible to achieve on 20 watts system even in a few years down the road. As such, scaling down games will be required to get games to run on the system, similar to how the Nintendo Switch handles running games in handheld mode. Sony already showed how scaling up is entirely possible with the PlayStation 5 Pro, so scaling down shouldn’t be impossible.
The real question is how scaling games down will be handled by this PlayStation 5 handheld. The Microsoft handheld, for example, may be similar to how things are handled for the Steam Deck and similar systems due to the company’s approach, letting the user tweak the graphics settings of the PC version of games to get games running decently. In addition, Microsoft could use the Xbox Series S profile available for all their games to get them to run decently on their handheld without leaving the user to configure settings. Sony, on the other hand, doesn’t have a lower-end PlayStation 5 model, so the handheld would require dedicated versions of games, while older games would need to be patched in order to run on the system. As such, the PlayStation 5 handheld could be the PS5 lower-end system that Sony currently doesn’t have that will offer a slice of what the base model offers in terms of visual fidelity and potentially backward compatibility.
All the current reports suggest that this PlayStation 5 handheld is still far from release, so it will be a very long time before we can see what it will be capable of and if it will ever be able to put a dent into the Nintendo Switch’s popularity, whose concept of home console and handheld all-in-one system will likely only get more popular with the release of its yet-to-be-revealed successor.
