Some PlayStation 5 owners may begin receiving invitations to a closed beta for an optional low-performance power-saving mode, which Sony will introduce with the latest system firmware on Thursday. The announcement has intensified speculation that the company is preparing developers to support a rumored handheld device.

After installing the update, users may notice a “Power Saver” setting in the options menu, but it will only activate for beta participants. Engaging the mode will lower performance for supported games to reduce power consumption.

Although Sony said that Power Saver is part of its plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, many suspect it may be a testing ground for an upcoming handheld system that will run PS5 games on less powerful hardware. Prominent leaker KeplerL2 previously reported that the device will only draw 15W.

However, Kepler also predicted that Sony would enable the portable system to run all PS5 titles, regardless of whether developers manually add low-performance modes. The company’s blog post announcing Power Saver indicates that developers must update their games to support it, and presumably the handheld as well.

While the exact wattage and performance reductions remain unclear, Sony’s announcement confirms a prior report from Moore’s Law is Dead. According to the YouTuber, developers are being advised to prepare for a setting that restricts the PS5 to eight threads, halves memory speed, lowers clock speeds by between 10 and 20%, and limits the PS5 Pro to the standard model’s 36 GPU compute units.

The handheld, reportedly scheduled for A0 tape-out later this year, employs AMD’s upcoming Zen 6 CPU and UDNA GPU architectures, features 149 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and may include an extra 16MB of cache. The PlayStation 6 and next-generation Xbox are expected to utilize more powerful variants of the same architecture.

Sony didn’t specify when Power Saver will be available to all PS5 owners, but cautioned that the public version might receive significant changes.

This week’s PS5 firmware update will let you pair a DualSense controller with up to four devices and switch between them without having to re-sync. Sony acknowledged that a growing number of players are using the PS5 controller on PCs, Macs, and mobile handsets.

Users pair and switch between devices by pressing the Home button and one action button simultaneously. For example, pressing and holding the home button and triangle button for over five seconds puts the controller into pairing mode for one device, such as a PS5. Repeating the process with the home and square buttons allows pairing with another device, such as a PC. In this situation, pressing home and triangle for three seconds switches the controller to the PS5, while pressing home and square for the same amount of time switches to the PC.