Steam Deck OLED beats Playstation Portal at streaming thanks to app update

Valve’s Steam Deck OLED has the PlayStation Portal beat when it comes to cloud streaming, thanks to the ability to stream using HDR.

The PlayStation Portal might only be around a month old, but thanks to a remote play app streaming update, the Steam Deck OLED has it beat when it comes to image quality when remotely streaming the PlayStation 5.

The Steam Deck OLED is already an incredibly performant machine, as we noted in our review, but the PlayStation Portal appears to be slightly more limited, with no way to play titles natively, meaning you have to rely on the PlayStation 5‘s remote play options, instead. We’ve not tried the PlayStation Portal yet, but the Steam Deck OLED has it beaten thanks to a handy little app named Chiaki4Deck.

Chiaki is effectively a PlayStation remote play client, much like PSPlay for Android, but on Steam Deck. This particular version is custom-built to run on Steam Deck, since the native version would not run on Linux.

Why the Steam Deck OLED beats the PlayStation Portal at streaming

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So, the reason why the Deck OLED beats the PlayStation Portal is in the hardware, as the name might suggest, the Deck OLED’s screen has HDR capability, meanwhile the Portal does not. Using Chiaki4Deck, you’re able to send this HDR signal from your PS5 console and beam it to your Steam Deck. The Portal just doesn’t have a screen good enough to drive HDR, meaning that the dedicated streaming console is actually beaten by the Steam Deck.

The normal Steam Deck is also capable of receiving the HDR signal, so long as you’re also connected to a capable enough display using the latest version of Chiaki4Deck.

The app effectively unlocks a whole new library to take with you on the go on Steam Deck, which is incredibly handy, if you’re partial to playing titles like God of War: Ragnarok on the go. The fact that it will also be streaming to the Steam Deck also means that you would get more battery life out of the system since it’s not really natively rendering anything at all.

So, with that in mind, the case for purchasing a Steam Deck OLED just got even higher. We keep finding more reasons to recommend one at this point, it’s just one of the best handhelds around.