PS Remote Play 2026: 1080p HQ in 12 Steps, 30 Min

On March 17, 2026 (PDT) — March 18 for most of the world — Sony pushed a system software update to the PlayStation Portal and, in the same window, to the PS Remote Play app. The headline was a 1080p High Quality mode for both Remote Play and Cloud Streaming. The internet read the words “1080p” and assumed the Portal had been handed a sharper screen. It had not. The Portal's 8-inch LCD has been 1080p at 60Hz since the day it shipped. What changed is the bitrate of the stream feeding those pixels.

That distinction is the entire point of this guide. Remote Play is not a resolution problem wearing a networking costume; it is a networking problem wearing a resolution costume. If your sessions stutter, desync, or collapse into a soupy 360p, no menu toggle will rescue you — the fix lives in your router, your rest-mode settings, and four ports most people have never had reason to think about. What follows is the full setup: prerequisites with real version numbers, a twelve-step walkthrough with a reason attached to every step, the exact menu path for the new high-bitrate mode, five pitfalls that quietly ruin sessions, a troubleshooting table, and a complete working configuration you can copy at the bottom.

Everything here is calibrated to the 2026 software. Where Sony declined to publish a version number — and for the Portal update, it did decline — this guide says so rather than invent one. You can read Sony's own PlayStation.Blog announcement and confirm the omission for yourself.

What the March 2026 Update Changed

Before you touch a single setting, understand what you are actually enabling. The 2026 update is small in scope and easy to misread, and misreading it is how people end up disappointed by a stream that looks exactly as sharp as it did last year while burning twice the data.

The “1080p” was always there — bitrate is the story

The Portal renders at 1080p. It always has. The old “1080p Standard” stream sent that resolution at a capped bitrate, which is why fast motion — a camera whip in a shooter, foliage, smoke, a dark gradient sky — dissolved into blocky compression artifacts and visible color banding. The new 1080p High Quality mode raises the bitrate ceiling for the same 1080p signal. Sony's phrasing is precise and worth quoting: the mode delivers “a higher bitrate compared to the default 1080p Standard mode.” The pixels were never the bottleneck; the bits-per-second describing them were. Engadget's coverage made the same point bluntly: the resolution was never the limiting factor.

The practical upshot is that you should expect cleaner motion, fewer macroblocks in dark or busy scenes, and smoother gradients — and, in exchange, meaningfully higher data consumption. If you play on a metered mobile connection, that trade is not automatically in your favor. More on that in the dedicated section below.

The adoption numbers Sony chose to share

Sony bundled the feature announcement with two data points, and it is worth reading them the way you would read any first-party statistic — as directionally true and selectively framed. According to the same March 2026 announcement, Cloud Streaming monthly active users grew 162% year over year as of January 2026, and more than 50% of Portal owners now hold a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription. Both figures are Sony's, from its own blog, corroborated by Video Games Chronicle and the Japanese-language post on Sony Japan's blog.

Note what Sony shares and what it withholds. A 162% growth rate is impressive precisely because you are not told the base it grew from. And “over half of Portal owners on Premium” is less a triumph than an admission: the device is increasingly sold to, and used by, people who need the cloud tier because they may not have a PS5 sitting at home to stream from. That is not a criticism of the update — it is context for why Sony is investing in stream quality at all.

What Sony did not tell you

Three omissions matter. First, there is no published version number for the Portal system software carrying this update; the announcement names the feature and the date and nothing else. The PS Remote Play app, separately, moved to the 7.0.x line around the same date — 7.0.0 introduced 1080p High Quality mode and 7.0.2 is the current point release — but that is the app, not the Portal firmware. Second, the 1080p High Quality tier depends on a PS5 source or on Cloud Streaming with Premium; a PS4 streaming to any client will never expose it. Third, as Engadget dryly observed, new account holders onboarded through the slick new QR-code flow “will still need to have access to a PS5 or sign up for PS Plus Premium to actually get any use out of the Portal.” The hardware is a window; it renders nothing on its own. If you are still deciding which console sits on the other side of that window, our breakdown of the PS5 Pro versus the standard PS5 covers what each brings to a Remote Play uplink.

Prerequisites: Hardware, Software, Bandwidth

Remote Play has three moving parts — a source console, a client, and the network between them — and a weakness in any one of the three caps the whole system. Get these prerequisites straight before you start clicking, because most “it doesn't work” complaints trace back to a box that was never checked here.

On the console side

Your source is a PS5 (any variant: standard, Digital Edition, Slim, or Pro) or a PS4 / PS4 Pro. The PS5 is required for the 1080p tier; the PS4 line streams Remote Play perfectly well but at lower resolution and bitrate ceilings. The console must be signed into the same PlayStation Network account you will use on the client, and it must be either powered on or in rest mode with networking enabled — a setting we will configure explicitly, because leaving it off is the single most common cause of “console not found.” Wire it to your router by Ethernet if the cable can possibly reach; the console is the fixed anchor of this system and it has no business being on Wi-Fi. A PS4 remains a completely legitimate Remote Play source in 2026, incidentally — the install base that made Sony's 117-million-unit generation is still very much online and streaming.

On the client side

Pick one of three clients. The PlayStation Portal is the dedicated device: an 8-inch 1080p/60Hz screen with a full DualSense-style controller wrapped around it. The PS Remote Play app is free and runs on iOS/iPadOS (a recent release), Android 10 or later, Windows 10/11, and macOS — and no, despite what a few 2025-dated blog posts imply, this app is not new; it has existed since the PS4 era, roughly 2016, and is published by PlayStation Mobile Inc. out of San Mateo, California. On phones and tablets you pair a DualSense or DualShock 4 over Bluetooth; on the Portal the controls are built in. The third option is Chiaki-ng, the open-source client, which is how a Steam Deck or a Linux handheld becomes a PS5 screen — unofficial, unsupported by Sony, and covered in the advanced section. If a handheld client is your endgame, our ROG Ally X versus Steam Deck OLED comparison is the relevant hardware reading.

Bandwidth and the 5/15 line

Sony's published requirement is a 5 Mbps minimum and a 15 Mbps recommended connection, and those numbers apply at both ends of the link. Treat 5 Mbps as the threshold below which Remote Play refuses to be pleasant, not a target. The vanity metric here is raw Mbps; the metrics that actually decide whether a session holds are jitter (variance in packet timing) and packet loss. A rock-steady 15 Mbps with sub-10-millisecond jitter and zero loss will outperform a 200 Mbps line that spikes and drops packets every time someone else on the network opens a video call. Your target, realistically, is a stable 15-20 Mbps reserved for the stream, low jitter, and effectively no loss. If your line can't hold that, drop the resolution before you drop the game.

Get Your Network Right First

If you do the networking correctly, the rest of this tutorial is a formality. If you do not, you will spend an evening toggling in-game menus that cannot fix a problem living two layers below them. So we do the network first, on purpose.

Wire the console, not the client

The console is stationary; the client roams. This asymmetry tells you exactly where to put your one Ethernet cable: on the console. The console's uplink is doing the hard work — encoding and transmitting the video stream — and every millisecond of Wi-Fi jitter on that side is jitter the client cannot recover from. The Portal is Wi-Fi-only and cannot be wired, so wiring the console is not merely preferable, it is the only place you can remove Wi-Fi from the equation. Do it. If your router and console are in different rooms, a pair of powerline adapters or a MoCA link beats Wi-Fi for this specific job.

5 GHz, channel width, and interference

Put the client on the 5 GHz band, not 2.4 GHz. The 2.4 GHz band is a shared junk drawer of microwaves, Bluetooth, and every neighbor's router; it has the range but not the clean throughput Remote Play needs. On 5 GHz, use an 80 MHz channel width on a lightly congested channel, and keep the client within reasonable line of sight of the access point. A single interior wall is fine; a floor and two walls is where sessions start hitching. If your home is large, a mesh node near where you actually play is worth more than any in-app setting.

The four ports Remote Play uses

Remote Play communicates over a specific, small set of ports. On a normal home network with a single router these are handled automatically, but the moment you sit behind double-NAT, carrier-grade NAT, or an aggressive software firewall, they become the difference between a session that starts and one that dies at “Connecting.” Here is the set worth knowing:

# PS Remote Play / Chiaki-ng - ports to allow (and forward if double-NAT'd)
TCP  9295        # session control & handshake
UDP  9296        # console discovery
UDP  9297        # audio + video stream  <-- the one that matters
UDP  9302        # registration / signaling

Commit UDP 9297 to memory: it carries the actual audio and video. If a firewall silently drops that one port, discovery and handshake can still succeed, so the client finds the console and appears to connect — and then the session collapses the instant real frames need to flow. That failure mode fools people for hours. The correct response to a firewall problem is never “disable the firewall” wholesale; it is to allow these four ports, which we will do concretely in the pairing section.

Enabling Remote Play on the Console

With the network sane, we configure the source. Everything in this section happens once, on the PS5 or PS4, and then you forget it exists — assuming you get the rest-mode settings right, which is the part everyone skips.

Enable Remote Play and link the account

On the console, open Settings > System > Remote Play and switch Enable Remote Play on. Confirm the console is signed into the PlayStation Network account you intend to use on your client — Remote Play authenticates by account, and a mismatch here produces a “can't connect” that no amount of network tuning will resolve. Here is the relevant slice of the PS5 settings tree, written as a checklist:

# PS5 - Remote Play & account, settings tree
Settings > System > Remote Play
    Enable Remote Play ............................... ON

Settings > Users and Accounts > Other
    Console Sharing and Offline Play ................ ON  (this console)

Rest mode — the setting everyone forgets

This is the one. For your client to wake a sleeping console — which is the entire convenience of Remote Play — the console must keep its network alive in rest mode. Open Settings > System > Power Saving > Features Available in Rest Mode and set the following:

# PS5 - Settings > System > Power Saving > Features Available in Rest Mode
Supply Power to USB Ports .......................... Always
Stay Connected to the Internet .................... ON
Enable Turning On PS5 from Network ................ ON

Miss the second and third toggles and your console will drop off the network the moment it dozes, and your client will report it missing. This accounts for a genuinely enormous share of “Remote Play stopped working” complaints: nothing broke, the console simply went to sleep with its network card switched off. Turn these on and the problem never appears.

Console sharing and license housekeeping

Enable Console Sharing and Offline Play (this activates the console as your primary), which you will have set in the tree above. This prevents a class of mid-session errors where the console re-checks a game license, fails to reach the right entitlement state, and boots you. It is a five-second toggle that removes an entire category of intermittent, hard-to-diagnose disconnects. While you are in the neighborhood of system maintenance, a console that has been misbehaving for unrelated reasons is often cured by the steps in our PS5 cache-clear and safe-mode walkthrough — worth a bookmark before you need it.

Installing and Pairing the Client

The source is ready. Now the client. This section covers the official app, the Portal, and the pairing mechanics — including a warning about the unofficial “controller” apps that periodically show up in search results promising to do things Sony's client already does.

The official app

Install the PS Remote Play app from the App Store, Google Play, or directly from the official PlayStation Remote Play page. Sign in with the same PSN account as the console. When both devices share an account and the same local network, the app discovers the console automatically — no PIN required. Inside the app, set your video quality before your first session. The relevant options and sane starting points:

The PlayStation Portal

The Portal is the path of least resistance: complete the out-of-box setup, sign into PSN, and it locates the console on your network without ceremony. Post-March-2026 it also carries Cloud Streaming for Premium subscribers and the 1080p High Quality toggle. The Portal is a fixed-function device by design — there is no browser, no store, no side-loading — which is exactly why it is the most reliable client: there is very little on it to misconfigure.

PINs, and the third-party apps to avoid

When automatic discovery is not available — a different account, a segmented network, or an unofficial client — you pair manually with an 8-digit PIN. On the console, go to Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device; it displays a code you enter on the client. That is the legitimate pairing flow, and it is the same mechanism the open-source clients use. It is not the flow used by the various third-party “PS Remote Play Controller” apps that surface in app stores — one of which is distributed by an outfit trading as usaworksolutions.org, which is not Sony and has no affiliation with it. These apps advertise on-screen touch controls and a “no physical controller needed” pitch, and they still demand manual PIN pairing to your console. The Machine's counsel is simple: the only unofficial client worth trusting is one whose source you can read, which means Chiaki-ng and nothing else. A closed-source third-party app that wants a pairing PIN to your PlayStation account is a risk with no upside the official app doesn't already cover for free.

The 12-Step Setup, Start to Finish

Here is the entire process as an ordered sequence. Each step includes the reason it exists, because a step you understand is a step you won't skip. Do them in order; the ordering is deliberate, moving from the fixed source outward to the roaming client and only then to quality tuning.

Before you press anything

Have three things within reach: the PSN account credentials you will use on both ends, the console's local IP address (Settings > Network > Connection Status on the PS5), and a client that is charged and updated. Two minutes of preparation here saves a mid-setup scramble later.

The twelve steps

1. Update the console and the client to the latest software. The 1080p High Quality option only appears on the March 2026 app line (7.0.x) and current Portal firmware; a version mismatch greys out the setting or hides it entirely, and you will blame the network for a software gap.
2. Sign both devices into the same PSN account. Remote Play authenticates by account, not by device. A wrong or second account is the most common reason a perfectly healthy console reports “can't connect.”
3. Wire the console to the router with Ethernet. This removes the console's Wi-Fi as a variable. The console encodes and sends the stream; its uplink must be the most stable link in the chain.
4. Enable Remote Play: Settings > System > Remote Play > Enable Remote Play. It is off by default on some configurations, and nothing downstream functions until it is on. This is the master switch.
5. Set rest-mode networking: Stay Connected to the Internet ON, Enable Turning On PS5 from Network ON. This lets the client wake a sleeping console. Skip it and every session that starts after the console naps will fail at discovery.
6. Enable Console Sharing and Offline Play (make this your primary console). This heads off mid-session license re-checks that otherwise disconnect you at random, unpredictable moments.
7. Put the client on 5 GHz Wi-Fi, close to the router. 2.4 GHz and distance both inject the jitter that adaptive bitrate punishes by dropping your resolution. Proximity to the access point is worth more than any menu.
8. Install and open the client, then pair. On the same account and network it auto-discovers; otherwise use Link Device and the 8-digit PIN. Pairing binds the client cryptographically to the console — the PIN path exists for cross-account and unofficial clients.
9. If you are behind double-NAT, CGNAT, or a strict firewall, allow TCP 9295 and UDP 9296, 9297, 9302. UDP 9297 carries the video; if it is blocked, the session negotiates and then dies the instant frames must flow. This step is a no-op on a simple single-router network and mandatory on a complex one.
10. Start a session and read the negotiated stream. Confirm the resolution, frame rate, and bitrate the client reports. A session that opens at 540p is telling you, before you touch anything, that the network — not the menu — is the current limit.
11. Once stable, raise quality. For PS5 sources set the client to 1080p and 60 fps, then enable 1080p High Quality via the Quick Menu. Start conservative and climb; the reverse order simply fails louder and teaches you nothing.
12. Test under load. Run a fast-moving game for ten minutes and watch for macroblocking and input lag. Menus and cutscenes stream cleanly at any setting; the truth about your link only shows up in real motion.

What a good first session looks like

When it works, the client's connection sequence reads roughly like this — a clean discovery, a registered device, a negotiated stream, and a network round-trip in the low tens of milliseconds:

[Remote Play] Searching for console... found PS5-XXXX (192.168.1.50)
[Remote Play] Establishing session... registered device OK
[Remote Play] Negotiated: 1080p @ 60fps, ~15 Mbps, codec H.265
[Remote Play] Round-trip (network): 28 ms
[Remote Play] Session started.

A network round-trip in the 25-40 ms range on a good connection is normal and playable. If you see three-digit latency or a resolution far below what you set, stop and fix the network before you touch a single quality option — the stream is already telling you where the problem is.

Turning On 1080p High Quality Mode

This is the feature you came for, and it is the shortest section in the guide, because the toggle itself is trivial. The judgment about when to use it is the part worth reading.

The exact menu path

The mode is enabled from inside an active session, not from the pre-session settings. During Remote Play or Cloud Streaming, open the Quick Menu and follow this path:

# During an active Remote Play / Cloud Streaming session:
[Quick Menu]  ->  [Max Resolution]  ->  [1080p High Quality]

# Then restart the Remote Play / Cloud Streaming session to apply.

On the Portal the Quick Menu is the PS button; in the app it is the on-screen control strip. The change does not take effect live — you must restart the session, which is Sony's wording and not an optional suggestion. If the option is greyed out or absent, your source is a PS4, your app predates the 7.0.x line, or you are on a Cloud Streaming session without the entitlement. This exact path is confirmed in Sony's March 2026 update announcement.

What it costs you in data

High Quality mode is a higher bitrate, and a higher bitrate is more bytes per second flowing to your client. Sony explicitly warns that the mode “will use more data than the other resolution options,” and separately, on its Remote Play support page, that mobile data usage counts against your carrier allowance and may be subject to carrier restrictions or throttling. Sony has not published exact bitrate figures for Standard versus High Quality, so this guide will not fabricate them — but the direction is unambiguous, and on a metered plan it is the difference between a comfortable evening and a data-cap notification.

When to leave it off

On flaky Wi-Fi or metered mobile data, 1080p Standard — or even 720p — is the smarter call. A clean, stable 720p is a categorically better experience than a 1080p High Quality stream that the pipe cannot hold, because the adaptive bitrate system will fight a starved connection by yanking the resolution up and down, and that oscillation is more distracting than a fixed lower resolution ever is. High Quality is a mode for a strong, unmetered home network. Deploy it there and leave it off everywhere else.

Five Pitfalls That Wreck a Session

These are the failure modes that generate the most wasted hours, grouped by where they originate. Every one of them has a clean fix, and none of the fixes is “buy faster internet.”

Bandwidth and data mistakes

Pitfall 1: chasing headline Mbps while ignoring jitter and loss. A gigabit line that spikes under household load will stutter where a stable 20 Mbps line is flawless. Fix: reserve bandwidth for the stream via router QoS (below), and measure jitter, not just speed. Pitfall 2: running 1080p High Quality on metered mobile data. The higher bitrate empties a data allowance fast and invites carrier throttling, which then causes the very stutter you turned the mode on to avoid. Fix: on cellular, drop to 720p Standard and accept it.

Power and rest-mode mistakes

Pitfall 3: the sleeping console with rest-mode networking off. This is the champion. The console naps, its network card powers down, the client reports it missing, and you conclude Remote Play is broken. Fix: the two rest-mode toggles from the console-setup section — Stay Connected to the Internet, and Enable Turning On PS5 from Network. Set them once and this pitfall disappears permanently.

Network topology mistakes

Pitfall 4: double-NAT or CGNAT silently killing UDP 9297. Handshake succeeds, video never flows, session dies seconds in. Fix: forward the four ports, or eliminate the second layer of NAT by bridging one router; for CGNAT, use Chiaki-ng or a VPN back to the home network. Pitfall 5: the client on 2.4 GHz or across the house. The band and the distance both inject jitter that no in-app setting can undo. Fix: 5 GHz, closer to the access point, or a mesh node where you play. A sixth honorable mention: trusting a closed-source third-party “controller” app over the official client. Don't. And note a real limitation while we're here — Share Play and Remote Play do not run simultaneously, so if a session refuses to start, check that you don't have the other feature already active.

Troubleshooting: Symptoms and Fixes

When a session misbehaves, resist the urge to randomly toggle settings. Match the symptom to its likely cause, apply the specific fix, and change one thing at a time. The table below covers the failures you will actually encounter.

The symptom-to-fix table

Reading the error codes

Most Remote Play failures surface as an alphanumeric code beginning with a number-heavy string; the great majority are network and session errors rather than account or hardware faults. Before you go code-hunting, check the three usual suspects in order: is the console awake and networked, is the account identical on both ends, and is UDP 9297 reaching the client. That triage resolves the overwhelming majority of coded errors without you ever needing to look the code up. When it does not, the official support page hosts Sony's current code lookup.

The reset ladder

When a specific fix doesn't apply, climb the reset ladder in order and stop at the first rung that works: restart the client app; power-cycle the console fully (not rest mode — a real restart); delete and re-pair the client with a fresh Link Device PIN; and, only as a last resort for a console that is misbehaving broadly, run the safe-mode maintenance in our PS5 cache-clear guide. Do not start at the bottom. A rebuild is not a first response to a dropped stream.

Advanced: Chiaki-ng, QoS, Remote Play Away

Once the basics hold, these are the levers that separate a usable stream from a genuinely good one — and the open-source client that unlocks hardware Sony's app will never officially touch.

Chiaki-ng on Steam Deck and desktops

Chiaki-ng is the actively maintained, open-source Remote Play client — the successor to the original Chiaki, which is now in maintenance-only mode. The current release is v1.10.0, dated April 3, 2026, and it runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, macOS, Android, and even the Nintendo Switch. It is the standard way to turn a Steam Deck or a Linux handheld into a PS5 screen, supporting 1080p60 streaming, bitrates up to roughly 30,000 Kbps, hardware-accelerated decoding, and HDR on capable hardware. It is not endorsed by Sony — you are trusting the code, which is precisely why being able to read that code matters. Registration uses your PSN Account ID in base64 form plus an 8-digit PIN from the console's Link Device screen:

# chiaki-ng - register a console from the CLI
# Account ID must be the base64 form of your PSN account ID.
# PIN: console -> Settings > System > Remote Play > Link Device (8 digits)

chiaki discover -h 192.168.1.50
chiaki register \
  --host 192.168.1.50 \
  --psn-account-id <BASE64_ACCOUNT_ID> \
  --pin 12345678

Most users will do this through the GUI rather than the command line, but the CLI makes the underlying mechanism legible. The source and builds live in the chiaki-ng repository on GitHub, and setup walkthroughs live in the Chiaki4Deck documentation, which the same maintainer keeps current.

Router QoS and prioritizing the stream

If your household shares the connection — and whose doesn't — the single highest-value tweak is Quality of Service. Prioritize the console's traffic, and specifically the UDP stream, above bulk downloads and video calls, and enable Smart Queue Management (SQM) if your router supports it to tame bufferbloat, which is the real cause of latency that spikes only when someone else is using the network. A generic configuration looks like this:

# Router QoS (generic / OpenWrt SQM example)
Prioritize:  UDP 9297 (plus 9296, 9302) from 192.168.1.50
Class:       High / Voice
SQM:         enabled (cake / fq_codel)
Downlink:    set to ~90% of measured line speed
Uplink:      set to ~90% of measured upload speed

Setting the QoS bandwidth caps slightly below your measured line speed is what gives the queue headroom to stay ordered under load — counterintuitive, but it is why a capped connection can feel faster for latency-sensitive traffic than an uncapped one.

Out-of-home play and the latency reality

Playing away from home is where expectations need calibrating. On your own LAN, an ICMP ping to the console reads around 1-2 ms — and that number is nearly meaningless for how the game feels, because it measures a bare network hop, not the full glass-to-glass path that also includes capture, encode, transmit, decode, and display. Felt latency on a good remote connection lands in the 25-40 ms range, which is playable for most single-player games and a real handicap in twitch multiplayer. Anyone quoting you a “2 ms” Remote Play latency is quoting a LAN ping and calling it something it is not. Away from home, the practical obstacles are carrier-grade NAT and restrictive firewalls; the standard answers are Chiaki-ng, which handles many NAT scenarios gracefully, or a VPN back to your home network, which sidesteps CGNAT entirely by making your client look local. If image quality is what you're chasing at the source, the upscaling story is a separate rabbit hole — our look at PSSR 2 on the PS5 Pro covers what the console itself can do before the stream ever leaves the house.

The Complete Working Configuration

Everything above, condensed into copyable reference blocks. If you configure exactly this and your line meets Sony's 15 Mbps recommendation, you will have a stable, high-bitrate Remote Play session. Adjust downward for weaker or metered connections.

Console settings, verbatim

# === PS5 / PS4 SOURCE CONFIGURATION ===
System > Remote Play
    Enable Remote Play ............................... ON

System > Power Saving > Features Available in Rest Mode
    Supply Power to USB Ports ....................... Always
    Stay Connected to the Internet .................. ON
    Enable Turning On PS5 from Network .............. ON

Users and Accounts > Other
    Console Sharing and Offline Play ............... ON (primary)

Network
    Connection ...................................... Wired (Ethernet)
    Note the console LAN IP (e.g. 192.168.1.50)

Network and client settings, verbatim

# === NETWORK ===
Console uplink .................................... Wired Ethernet
Client link ....................................... 5 GHz Wi-Fi, 80 MHz
Bandwidth (each end) .............................. 15 Mbps+ (5 Mbps floor)
Ports (forward only if double-NAT / CGNAT):
    TCP 9295 | UDP 9296 | UDP 9297 | UDP 9302
Router QoS ........................................ prioritize UDP 9297
                                                    from console IP; SQM on

# === CLIENT (app or Portal) ===
Account ........................................... same PSN account as console
Resolution ........................................ 1080p (High Quality)
Frame rate ........................................ High (60 fps)
Enable HQ (in session) ...... Quick Menu > Max Resolution > 1080p High Quality
                             then restart the session

# === UNOFFICIAL CLIENT (Steam Deck / Linux) ===
Chiaki-ng ......................................... v1.10.0 (Apr 3, 2026)
Register .......................................... PSN Account ID (base64) + 8-digit PIN
Stream ............................................ up to 1080p60 / ~30000 Kbps / HW decode

The one-screen summary

Wire the console. Turn on rest-mode networking. Match the account. Put the client on 5 GHz. Allow four ports if your network is complicated. Start conservative, confirm the negotiated stream, then climb to 1080p High Quality via the Quick Menu and restart the session. Reserve the high-bitrate mode for a strong home connection and drop to 720p on cellular without guilt. Do that, and Remote Play in 2026 is what Sony spent March selling it as — a genuinely sharp 1080p stream — rather than a menu toggle that fights your router all evening. The pixels were never the hard part. The network always was.