PlayStation Portal goes HQHD
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HD in your hands
P layStation are rolling out more patches this week than my old Boy Scout Unit. No sooner do we get PSSR 2.0 at the flick of an OS button, now the silent hit, PlayStation Portal gets a much needed collection of updates, least of which is a brand new, High Bit rate, High Quality true 1080p HD streaming and remote play mode. This is the best thing this side of a downloadable OLED patch, and until that becomes a reality it will improve all our PlayStation Handheld gaming moments. But this is not all that is coming to the spiritual PS Vita, oh no, we have a bunch of other updates detailed over on the PS Blog ahead of its March 18th Release.
Playing in the Clouds
The 1080P High Bit Rate mode is available within the Operating System menu (once the updated is installed). From here you can choose to toggle between the standard HD mode and this new, higher fidelity version, by chosing the “1080p High Quality” option. Once selected your current PS+ streaming game or PS5/PS5 Pro streaming title will now be displayed with a cleaner, sharper and cripser image that should look much closer to a high end PC handheld device.
Bolstering the feature set and expeprience of the remote play device even further, is specific enhancements to the cloud streaming functionality. These new features or updates will make game invites easier to see and joing, an improved Trophy screen, improved search and stream functions helping to bridge the remote play to big screen play gap.
- Improved Product Detail Page
- Game Invite
- Enhanced Trophy notifications
The Portal has been a slow but big growth area for Sony since launch, with it making huge strides in its quality, functionality and feature set in that time. And now a high quality mode for streaming, that needs at least 15Mbps bandwidth for Cloud Streaming is another big hike in that quality. And as game streaming has grown for PlayStation by over 160% YoY and over 50% of Portal players now have a PlayStation Plus account, this is going to be another push into more markets. I look forward to putting the new mode to the test soon to see how well it improves the late night gaming for old gamer eyes.
