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PlayStation 4's Remote Play connection with PS Vita is exciting stuff - a value-added extra with the potential to revitalise the fortunes of Sony's under-performing handheld. Nintendo's Wii U GamePad established the notion of decoupling from your HDTV and playing remotely with excellent image quality and no noticeable lag. Since then, Nvidia's Shield has come along - not quite as impressive right now, but great stuff nonetheless, with a new update coming up soon that promises significant improvements. Call it wishful thinking on our part, but we couldn't help but hope for similarly impressive results from PlayStation 4.All of these streaming gameplay set-ups are based on very similar principles: the current frame is grabbed from memory by a hardware encoder, compressed into h.264 video, beamed over WiFi to the handheld, then decoded and displayed on-screen while control inputs are transmitted back to the host. Wii U accomplishes all of this extremely quickly - we ran the GamePad alongside a PlayStation 3D screen with 33ms display lag, and via high-speed photography we noted absolute parity in the refresh. Nvidia's Shield system offered no direct connection between handheld and PC, but even via a router we noted remarkably swift response - despite a downgraded 30Hz display refresh. Nintendo also took the honours on image quality, with macroblocking artefacting much more noticeable on Shield, mitigated only by the small display.
The stakes are high for Sony then. There's a really high expectation level with Vita Remote Play because the core technology has been proven to work on not one, but two different systems. Indeed, Nvidia manages to hand in a highly playable experience despite the lack of a direct hook-up between the PC and the Shield handheld - traffic needs to travel via a router, presenting its own latency implications. That expectation level is raised still further by the upcoming arrival of Vita TV - a screen-less version of the handheld that, in time, will also support PS4 Remote Play (we've got a Japanese unit in-house now and rather annoyingly it's not enabled in the current firmware). Sony's new venture doesn't just need to work on the smaller screen, it needs to scale up for HDTV usage too.
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