While the PlayStation 6 might still be quite some time away, a new report indicates that Sony has been making quite a few important decisions to ensure backwards compatibility on the rumoured handheld PS6 for PS5 games. As detailed in a new video by Moore’s Law is Dead, Sony has been pushing its partner developers to ensure that games have compatibility with the PS5’s Low-Power mode.
As part of this push, Sony has asked developers to not simply lower their games’ frame rates in order to ensure compatibility with Low-Power mode. Rather, the company has directed developers to instead lower their games’ resolution while still maintaining 60 FPS. To help in achieving this, the CPU usage utility part of PS5 game development – Razor CPU – also has walkthroughs that aim in helping developers find CPU-bound bottlenecks that can then be optimised to lower CPU usage.
“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 video, “and they honestly seemed a bit annoyed at how few devs directly support it so far.”
The PS6 handheld is slated to support backwards compatibility for PS4 and PS5 games, with Sony’s major selling point for the system seemingly being the ability for players to carry around their entire PlayStation digital library with them wherever they go. Previous reports have even indicated that this backwards compatibility support doesn’t need any additional work from developers.
As for how this will be possible, the handheld system is reportedly powered by an RDNA 5 AMD chip with 16 compute units capable of running at up to 1.20 GHz in handheld mode. The handheld is also rumoured to be capable of running at higher clock speeds – up to 1.65 GHz – when docked, similar to Nintendo and its Switch and Switch 2 consoles.
As for backwards compatibility, the PS6 is rumoured to make use of shader binaries that are compatible with PS5 games as well. Considering Sony’s push towards the Low-Power mode feature that recently made its way to the PS5, the idea that it might be a way by Sony to push games to use less horsepower than they usually would in order to support a future handheld device doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
The Low-Power mode was introduced on PS5 in the form of its new Power Saver option in a firmware update from back in September. The feature launched with compatibility with a few games – Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Demon’s Souls, and Ghost of Yōtei. However, Sony’s push for more companies to ensure compatibility of games with the feature will likely mean more and more games will support it going forward.
The PS6 home console as well as the handheld are rumoured to be aiming for 2027 launch window. This report comes courtesy of leaker KeplerL2, who noted that Sony is aiming for a 7-year console cycle for the PS5 to keep it in line with the last couple of console generations.