Thing about the PC market is it is a collective effort by various vendors and products, so there is no need for any specific product to obtain mass market appeal. That’s why it is dumb to compare or bring up how much Steam Deck or ROG Ally sell. Valve have already said it; the main point of the Steam Deck is to promote the growth of handheld PCs segment, which by proxy, expand the overall PC market. While digital PC handheld play games on the same setting as a low end laptop or old PC rig.
By the time this hypothetical handheld is out, it’ll be near PS6 release. No publisher’s going to dedicate effort making a portable patch for their PS5 game when they and the PS audience will be focusing on PS5, PS5 Pro and PS6.
You're looking at this handheld the wrong way. Very likely, it will be something that PS5-level in terms of overall performance and will be compatible with PS5 games. But, it will also be targeted to play
PS6 games at scaled-down settings.
How exactly SIE accomplish that, we'll see over time. I won't be surprised if the PS6 in terms of base performance (for example, TF) isn't that much more powerful than the PS5 Pro. We're reaching a point where smart technologies for upscaling and automating parts of the graphics pipeline for programmers is going to matter much more than how many teraflops you can push into a chip.
IMO it would be smart if major performance uplift for PS6 comes through smarter technologies (more iteration with the I/O subsystem, local cache buffers to handle processing closer to memory or in memory itself, chiplets to help reduce power consumption and simplify cooling systems, PSSR 2.0 for even better image upscaling, something equivalent to PSSR for handling parts of LOD generation through framebuffer feedback and metadata, AI-based image filtering in real-time etc.). I'd expect versions of these things in future Xbox hardware as well, tho I'm sure there's going to be points of divergence and SIE's approach will probably be more hardware-accelerated (because MS would want something that can scale to Windows and that's probably better more software-driven for them but still some hardware-accelerated parts in there).
Sharing that 'smart tech' between the console and handheld can help smooth over a great amount of work related to performance scaling being handled mainly by the hardware and OS. Anything that can help reduce game budgets and speed up AAA development would be beneficial, and make AA games more palatable for the market at large. All of which of course would benefit a new handheld.
Z1 Extreme is far from a PS5 in practice, those are the new "fake" double counted flops you're seeing at bench test dream speeds. The base PS5 would be a 21TF part at the same metrics. In reality in a closed "console" with a slimmer OS, The Z1 would probably be somewhere around a desktop 1070/1080/2060, which is still more than enough to run everything in at least 540p 30fps, and most stuff far higher. With this PSP 2/3, we're also talking about a hypothetical Z2 with much more die space and power applied to the GPU rather than the CPU. Astonishingly the Z1E's CPU benches just a little behind a Ryzen7 7700 Desktop part, which is flat out retarded for a portable gaming system who's GPU struggles to hit 30fps, nevermind 60. It's literally just a laptop APU they rebadged/rebranded for gaming windows devices, no customization whatsoever, and completely lopsided design. A more GPU tilted Z2 would absolutely demolish every PS5 game at portable resolutions, and would probably run 90% of PS6 games to be honest if you're ok with 480p/30 on a 6" screen.
Thanks for the detailed breakdown; the way explained here, there is some genuine possibility a Z2-based/derived type of APU from SIE with a differently paired GPU would definitely be able to provide PS5-level compatibility for games software.
And, the likelihood of the portable coming 3-4 years from now gives plenty of time to make it happen.
How will it rival a Switch?. Nintendo magic is in the game not necessarily the console.
Yeah, this is something very much worth stressing. That headline title sounds like the thing gaming media said about the Game Gear and Lynx back in the day, missing the point that ultimately Nintendo had 1P & 3P exclusives that benefited the Game Boy to outdo those other handhelds on the market.
IMO, the Nomad would've been a much better competitor if it A) had better battery life and, B) came out earlier. The concept of taking your Genesis library on the go was novel (similar to the Turbo Express, but the Turbographx performed horribly in America & Europe) and would have netted the Nomad probably at least 10 million in sales if the battery life weren't so bad & it came out in say '92 or '93 instead of '95 when the Genesis was already being phased out of the market.
The way I see a new PS portable (or the rumored Xbox portable, for that matter), is basically the Nomad & Turbo Express but done the right way. But companies like SIE benefit from modern technology the way SEGA and NEC didn't back in the '90s; PlayStation itself also benefits from being the quintessential gaming brand in non-mobile spaces for most AAA and AA, and a lot of indie titles to boot. So a portable able to play PS games on the go will have a much bigger market potential than the Turbo Express or Nomad ever did.
Or even the Steam Deck, though that's mainly because Valve simply aren't producing those in higher volumes (although if they did, would still be limited by the fact not all 130+ million Steam users are high spenders or even spend that much on games or gaming hardware, for example because you can make a Steam account for free). As for Nintendo, well no one else has their IPs and systems like Wii U and Gamecube should've proven by now their games can sell very well even on very small install bases.
I think Nintendo will (or at least should) leverage their IPs with 3P partners, lean into it for development of exclusive content in versions of select 3P games on Switch 2. Like why not have Mario-themed costumes for some characters in a Switch 2 version of Tekken 8? Or some Pokemon crossover stuff in their platform's version of a Monster Hunter port? They could do the inverse too tho it'd probably be a lot more specific. These are just basic examples tho; if they wanted it could get a lot more elaborate.
Nintendo has the most amount of popular, evergreen and all-ages friendly IP to leverage for that type of stuff. That and their games, as usual, are their differentiation factor.
What if it comes with a HDMI port and you can connect a DualSense to it?
Do PC portables already allow for this, at least the HDMI Out port feature? I know with Steam Deck you can connect KB&M and use it like a computer if you want.
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