Sony’s hardware isn’t perfect either, and the PlayStation Portal, which can’t be played locally, has a small glitch that can be very confusing.
Ever since its launch, the PlayStation Portal, which is little more than a DualSense controller with a display, has had a little glitch that can still be quite annoying. It causes games to stutter, and now we’ve found out exactly why. The reason is that the PlayStation 5 doesn’t handle Remote Play streaming perfectly.
On Reddit, user parasupaman wrote that the lag is caused by image refresh errors. The PlayStation 5 streams via Remote Play at 59.94 Hz. Any client using a different rate will stutter. So if you have a display that can handle 60 Hz but not 59.94, you won’t get perfect performance on it either. External, third-party applications handle this with their own frame-rate settings, while devices that support variable refresh rate (VRR) adjust the refresh rate to provide a smooth experience.
There’s evidence of the problem in the three videos embedded below, so you can see if this is indeed the cause of the PlayStation Portal’s unusual performance. In the meantime, what is Sony doing? It’s sitting on its butt, because the company could have had several months to admit the bug, but now that it can be certified what the problem is, the company needs to act (otherwise this ignorant attitude will result in a pretty massive PR disaster). Sony wants to add more features to PlayStation Portal (so you can play WITHOUT a PlayStation 5 to stream PlayStation Plus games from the cloud…), but it needs to fix this first.
We are curious when Sony will reveal PlayStation Portal sales figures. However, seeing as they’re hiding PlayStation Plus subscriber data, it’s unlikely that will ever happen.
Source: WCCFTech
