Last week, during its Showcase conference, Sony formalized “Project Q”, a portable accessory that will let you stream your games from PS5. Unlike portable consoles like the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally, Sony’s accessory won’t have a built-in graphics chip.
Its primary function will be to manage lag-free game streaming and user input by leveraging PlayStation’s cloud-based game processing. Project Q should therefore use Remote Play feature that lets you play your PS5 games on other devices. So essentially it will be an external display with integrated controller equipped with a network chip powerful enough to receive the video stream from your home console. and it’s not a portable console you can take with you on the go.
What autonomy for Sony’s Q Project?
The ad was missing a crucial piece of information: battery life. This was done without taking into account the information that Tom Henderson, an industry person, has just disclosed. Sony Project Q will only offer three to four hours of playtime between charges.
As such, it’s not much better than Valve’s Steam Deck or ASUS’ ROG Ally, which uses their CPU and GPU to render games natively and therefore need a lot of energy to run.
Frankly, we expected a much longer battery life. taking into accountabsence of energy-consuming components in the consoleWe can assume that Sony Project Q will offer longer battery life, like the Logitech G Cloud, which reached 10 hours during our testing.
That’s why Sony probably bet on a small battery for Project Q. which indicates a thinner and lighter device than its competitors. It will also have to be seen whether this will allow the accessory to be positioned at a competitive price, but such news may well disappoint some players who expect more autonomy.
