While there have been plenty of reports and rumors about the power of Sony’s next-generation console, the PS6, a key thing to remember is that the company is also reportedly working on a handheld system to launch alongside it. Industry insider KeplerL2 has now shed some light about the handheld system’s performance, taking to the NeoGAF forums to reveal that it will be faster than the Xbox Series S in both raster and ray tracing performance.
Responding to possible performance differences between the rumored handheld and other devices, KeplerL2 wrote that its GPU is “a bit ahead” of the Xbox Series S when it comes to raster performance. However, ray tracing and path tracing both put Sony’s handheld “massively ahead” of Microsoft’s lower-end console. When it comes to the Nintendo Switch 2, the insider has described the PS6 handheld as offering superior image quality thanks to its use of FSR 5 and PSSR 3, referring to them as having “better IQ than even current DLSS 4.5.” This is worth noting since the Switch 2 is capable of upscaling through DLSS 2.
As for the raw hardware powering the PS6 handheld, some specifications were leaked back in August 2025, indicating that its chip is based on a single die fabricated on a 3 nm process. While previously believed to have 4 Zen 6c cores, more recent reports indicate that it will also include 2 Zen 6 LP cores, along with 16 RDNA 5 compute units to handle graphics. It is expected to include 24 GB of memory, with transfers handled through a 192-bit LPDDR5X bus.
Reports from back in December have indicated that Sony’s relatively recent emphasis on the PS5’s Low-Power mode comes down to the company preparing developers to release games on the PS6 handheld. One report, courtesy of YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead, indicated that Sony has been actively pushing its partner developers to ensure that games are compatible with the Low-Power mode.
This push includes the company asking developers not to simply lower the frame rates of their games. Rather, the emphasis is seemingly on lowering resolutions while still maintaining 60 FPS. “It is becoming glaringly obvious that Low-Power mode is a Trojan Horse for getting PS6 handheld support ready before its launch,” said one developer, according to the YouTuber, “and they honestly seemed a bit annoyed at how few devs directly support it so far.”
Another report further pushed this belief, indicating that newer Sony documentation put compatibility with Low-Power mode on high priority. Along with this, a developer seemingly reported that development kits for PS5 games had been patched to emphasize the mode.
“Sony just patched all of their SDKs for PS5 game development back to 1.0 to support Power Saver Mode (they’re currently on 12.0),” said a developer to Moore’s Law is Dead. “To be clear – they didn’t even do this for PS5 Pro support – if you had an old launch game on SDK 1.0 or 2.0, they’d tell you to ‘update to the latest SDK’ if you wanted to start working on adding direct PS5 Pro modes to your game. That means Power Saver Mode support is more important to them than Pro support!”
