According to WccfTech, well-known industry source Bryan Heemskerk recently expressed some interesting opinions. He pointed out that the rumored new PS handheld console is unlikely to drag down the performance of PS6 games, but those PC ported games will.
Some time ago, MILD exposed the specific specifications of PS6 "codenamed Orion" and PS handheld console "codenamed Canis", and pointed out that PS6 is expected to be officially launched in the fall of 2027, and PS handheld console is expected to debut simultaneously with PS6.
Some people are worried about whether the actual performance of the PS handheld console can drive PS6 games to run smoothly. After all, unlike Nintendo's "handheld first" philosophy, Sony's strategy seems to be more focused on "host first, handheld supplementary". Will Sony follow Microsoft's lead with the Xbox Series S and force all PS6 games to run on the weaker handheld console? After all, it would be somewhat embarrassing if your own handheld machine cannot run your own console games smoothly.
In the latest episode of the MILD podcast, another industry source, Bryan Heemskerk, talked about this and said that the PS handheld console will not actually drag down the performance of games on the PS6 console because we have entered the "post-resolution era." He pointed out that games like "Street Fighter 6" benefit from NVIDIA's DLSS blessing. Although the resolution on NS2 is lower than that on Xbox Series S, the effect looks better.
He said that most developers believe that lowering the resolution can better maintain the look and feel of the game than lowering the image quality, so just aim for resolution rather than cutting out a lot of visual effects. If the leaked parameters are true, and with the increasingly mature picture improvement technology of Sony's PSSR and AMD FSR 4, porting the console version to the handheld version is actually not an insurmountable obstacle.
He also said that the inevitable PC port version is now more likely to limit the development of PS6 games. Because almost every PS console game now is developed with possible future PC ports in mind. In this case, developers must juggle different hardware configurations, with many PC gamers still using entry-level graphics cards and storage-bottlenecked devices from generations ago. If a game completely squeezes the hardware potential on the console, it will cause huge problems for PC porting, so developers often will not take this risk.
He also cited a few examples: "Metal Gear Solid 3: Remastered Edition" is a multi-platform game. The original version once squeezed the PS2's performance, but the image quality of this remake does not look much better than "Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain", and problems occur frequently. However, "Death Stranding 2" and "Metroid Prime Remastered Edition" are exclusive games and do not need to consider PC porting, so they can safely and boldly push the hardware to the limit.
In addition, he also believes that since AMD’s market share is not enough to promote the widespread application of the new features it has developed for next-generation consoles, it is foreseeable that the need to consider PC porting in the future will greatly affect the extent to which games can realize the potential of new hardware.