Overview
It’s 2026. People are still playing PS Vita daily. Some are even playing PSP. Mostly because of how compact it is for traveling. In comparison to Nintendo Switch both of these consoles are compact and have longer battery life. We have an article with comparison between PSP and PSV.
PS Vita was released almost 15 years ago and was packed with technologies. Vita has touchscreen and touchpad on the opposite sides of the console. Magnetoresistive wheatstone bridge analogue sticks (similar to hall effect). OLED display in 1000 models (later in 2000 models they were replaced with IPS due to early OLED issues). It has ARM CPU with four cores and GPU with support of shaders.
Even today when you use unlocked Vita you can download and install all the games you want through wifi and a special application. No need to use PC and deal with card readers.
The main problem with PS Vita nowadays are not the games, but that this is a 15 years old device. Time heavily effects the screen, even more than it did for PSP due to technologies of them.
Even the format of cartridges PS Vita is using is very close to modern Nintendo Switch.
Hardware
Vita packs ARM Cortex A9. It is a four cores CPU based on ARM v7 architecture, introduced in 2007. It’s hard to believe with capabilities of Vita that the CPU by default runs at 333 mhz, similar to PSP. But since the architecture of PSV’s CPU is newer it is capable to do more instructions per cycle than PSP’s CPU.
By the modern standards it’s a very low frequency. But it was a conscious choice because Vita has only 2200 mAh battery. CPU is actually able to run up to 444 mhz easily, the problem is the battery life. And Vita easily handles 5 hours of game-play. Something that not every modern phone with bigger battery can do if gaming.
For the era CPU was released in it was fast and efficient. It is capable to run games such as Killzone, Uncharted and Digimon for easy.
GPU is quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+. Similar to one that was used in Apple iPad 2 (plus indicates Sony’s customization).
It is capable to output 133 million vertices per second and 4 milliard pixels (depends on the shaders). This GPU beat almost everything in mobile segment at the moment of its release. It was able to outperform Tegra by a big margin.
In terms of features the PSV’s GPU packs abilities similar to what you find in DirectX 9.0. Sony is obviously using proprietary API so it’s not the same as DirectX. Some websites like TechPowerUp state support of DirectX 10.1.
In other words with some adjustments Vita was capable to run anything that was released back in the days. Some AAA games required optimization and special treatment but making them work was 100% possible.
Vita has 512 MB of RAM and 128 MB of VRAM. It’s more memory than PS3 had. Amount of RAM, made under the influence of pricing, was a big limitation of PS3.
In other words PSV had less constraints for cross platform in comparison to Sony’s stationary console.
How capable PS Vita is nowadays?
Today Vita receives almost no games. It gets only some titles from enthusiasts so it’s hard to say how it would run modern indie games.
Modern game engines like Unity don’t support such outdated APIs so even if someone would try to port modern Unity or Unreal Engine 4 to Vita they will fail due to it. The ways how some special effects and situations are solved in terms of graphical programming are now completely different with additional pipeline stages like compute shaders.
So even if we take visually simple indie titles due to modern engines it would be impossible to run them on Vita and it’s a bigger limitation, than the hardware itself.
There was a case of porting Unreal Engine 3 based games like Border Lands 2 to Vita. Game wasn’t very well optimized but somewhat worked. But with UE4 all support for Vita was dropped.
In other words developer needs to specifically target Vita to make a game that works both on PC and Vita. It’s possible to do only if using game engines like Unreal Engine 3 or old versions of Unity. Some people write custom game engines for their games so it’s also an option, but will take a lot of effort.
Sadly, after 15 years Vita lost all the support from both engine manufacturers and Sony. Even if the hardware itself is suitable for many indie titles you find on Steam.