Monday, May 20th 2024
Sony Working on a New PlayStation Handheld Capable of PS4 Games?
With handheld gaming devices being all the rage these days, thanks to PC manufacturers getting into the form-factor; the conditions seem ripe for a new PlayStation handheld generation. Rumors of Sony working on a new gaming handheld first surfaced in February 2024 from a Moore's Law is Dead report, and now other leakers are resonating the theory. This is a fully fledged handheld console that runs games locally, unlike the PlayStation Portal, which was a cloud gaming endpoint device.
The PlayStation 4 debuted a decade ago, with SoC hardware specs that can easily be match by current-generation AMD Ryzen Z1 APUs, in handheld console power footprints; and the leakers tend to agree—the new handheld console will be able to play all the games from the PlayStation 4 library, besides its own unique crop of games that take advantage of certain handheld human interface features, such as a touchscreen, accelerometer, and gyro.
Source:
Game Rant
The PlayStation 4 debuted a decade ago, with SoC hardware specs that can easily be match by current-generation AMD Ryzen Z1 APUs, in handheld console power footprints; and the leakers tend to agree—the new handheld console will be able to play all the games from the PlayStation 4 library, besides its own unique crop of games that take advantage of certain handheld human interface features, such as a touchscreen, accelerometer, and gyro.
13 Comments on Sony Working on a New PlayStation Handheld Capable of PS4 Games?
I would expect a new Sony handheld like the article is referring to would sell tens of millions of units soon after release if the price is reasonable.
Current CPU architecture can perform on low power mobile as desktop Ryzen 3700X, then just use a weaker iGPU that would perform on 720p/900p like PS5 does at 4K
Just imagine something like Steam Deck or ROG ALLY but released with the latest AMD architectures
I'd love to be proven wrong.
Btw I'd like a worthy successor to the PSP.
Given that the PS Portal has been selling out due to the flexibility of being able to remotely access the PS5 anywhere, I could easily see a PSP2/PSV2 also sell out if it adds full offline gaming capability on top of that, plus being able to use it to watch/stream movies/video, and other similar stuff that people also side-use their Steam Decks/Ally/Ayaneos for (even the oddballs who use theirs for non-gaming work).
If Sony makes a new handheld, and it can run PS4 games or their equivalent, I'm curious what APU it's going to run on....Sony probably saw Steam Deck and thought to itself "now is a great time for us to introduce a new propritary physical media format in a hand-held system to re-sell scaled-back PS4 games!" :(
Not a fan of the shennanigans that these hardware companys like to play with their marketing anymore.....(Microsoft included, Nintendo is exempt...they never promise the world anymore but their history of abandoned hardware is also telling).
For Sony, this would just be another peripheral to cover as much ground as they can. The fact that the PS Portal does sell out regularly shows there's value in some kind of portable device, and if Sony can market off their own Deck/Ally-alike, would further push their reach into the mobile space again.
Even then though; unless Sony gets their act together and start better integrating and supporting both the fixed console and portable console game releases, they'll end up repeating the same issues that plagued the PSP and PSV, which was lack of consistent game catalogs on both. Given that the hardware should be on similar standards this time around, it should theoretically be easier for Sony to get devs working on dual-releases for PSP2/PSV2 and PS5, making use of the preset graphics options to control performance and quality (somewhat like they did with the PSV and PS4, where the PSV just ran the same game with lower graphics and sometimes lower poly models).