I Just Discovered PS5's Power Saver Mode In NBA 2K27: Here's What It's For
After playing a few sessions of NBA 2K27 , I finally decided to investigate the small icon beside the game's name on the Home Menu. Turns out it's called Power Saver Mode-compatible, and chances are some of you are running into it for the first time through this exact game too, so I did some digging, and I'm here to share what I found out about you.
What is Power Saver Mode?
Power Saver is a per-game performance profile on PS5 that scales back a game's power draw, at the cost of visual quality or frame rate. Think a Performance Mode, but it's applied from your PS5's settings instead of toggled in-game.
It's been around since a system update in September 2025, but it only works in games that specifically add support for it, like NBA 2K27 , Demon's Souls , and Days Gone Remastered . So, unless you're playing one of the roughly dozen titles currently on that list, you'd never see it.
When it's active, a game typically locks to a single, more modest resolution or frame rate target instead of letting you pick between separate Performance and Quality modes, and VR support becomes unavailable while it's turned on.
The actual power savings are real: independent testing on Demon's Souls found it drops from around 230W at full performance down to roughly 90W with Power Saver enabled, a reduction of more than 60%.
How To Turn On Power Saver Mode
If you want to try it yourself, head to:
Settings>System>Power Saving>Power Saver for Games.
From there, toggle Use Power Saver on and choose which supported games you want it applied to.
Games that support the feature show a small icon next to their name once installed, and when you're actually playing one with it enabled, that same icon shows up in the interface overlay when you press the PS button.
Why It Exists
Sony says Power Saver ties it to its "Road to Zero" environmental initiative, aimed at cutting down energy consumption and emissions across its hardware lineup. That's the official line, and it's the one worth taking at face value.
There's also a persistent theory floating around, pushed by outlets like Digital Foundry and plenty of community speculation, that this might be a tech demo for a future PlayStation product.
The theory goes that this mode doubles as an early look at the power envelope a rumored PS6 handheld might need to work within, since the throttled specs it creates on PS5 hardware land in a similar ballpark to what a portable device could realistically support. Sony hasn't confirmed that connection itself, so this one's just a speculation or a fun theory, at least for now.
Either way, if you've got a game on the supported list and don't mind the visual tradeoff, it's a genuinely easy way to cut your console's power draw in half.
This story was originally published by GameDaily on Aug 27, 2026, where it first appeared in the Games section. Add GameDaily as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
