If Sony really is making a new handheld and then decides to transplant that hardware into a home console, one leaker says that would not be a very pleasant outcome.

Last week, following a detailed breakdown of the PlayStation 6 bill of materials and expected pricing, which we covered earlier, speculation began circling around a possible PlayStation 6 lite model using the handheld Canis APU. Some people suggested such a model could hit the market at a lower price than both the standard home console and the handheld. According to Kepler_L2, however, the odds of that happening are basically zero, because a machine like that would be a nightmare for developers. How could that be if the handheld already exists? The leaker argues that making something look good on a small 1080p screen is very different from making it look good on a large 4K television. On top of that, we still do not know whether Sony will require handheld support as a platform baseline.

There is also the fact that the Canis APU powering the handheld is built around specialized low-power libraries. It simply cannot run at high clocks no matter how much power you feed it, which means using it in a home system while expecting 4K output would be a terrible idea. Upscaling would not save it either. Going from 1080p to 4K means a 16x resolution increase, and doing that without image artifacts or blur is very difficult. Upscaling cost also scales with output resolution, so if moving from 1080p via AMD FSR 5 or PSSR 3 takes around 2 ms on Canis, then jumping to 4K would take roughly 8 ms. Even with higher docked clocks, it would probably still be at least 5-6 ms, meaning developers would have to do extra optimization work for the docked configuration just to reach the same FPS as handheld mode, according to the leaker.

While a PlayStation 6 lite model based on the handheld APU is therefore highly unlikely, some kind of lower-end version is still conceivable. Kepler_L2 thinks it would make more sense to use the Orion APU from the home console in a slightly different configuration. That setup would feature a 6-core CPU cluster, a 16 WGP GPU, CPU and GPU clocks lowered by 10%, a 128-bit bus, and 24 GB of RAM. According to the leak, that would cut RAM-related BOM costs by $60, with another $20-$30 saved through reduced motherboard and cooling requirements. Reducing the SSD to 512 GB would bring even more meaningful BOM savings, although the leaker believes Sony could only get away with that if developers were forced to use NTC.

As things stand, the PlayStation 6 handheld looks set to be the cheaper gateway into next-generation console gaming. Still, the uncertainty around mandatory support means it remains unclear how Sony plans to handle its next-gen systems, and whether the company can keep the desktop console somewhere around the $700 range.

Source: WCCFTech, NeoGAF, NeoGAF, NeoGAF, NeoGAF, NeoGAF