| Tridrakious said: I'm disappointed in Sony's handling of the PS Vita situation. They seem to fully understand what the home console side needs, but always manage to screw up on the handheld side. |
They do
Sony has mandated Vita Remote Play for all upcoming PS4 games - except those that require the use of its bundled stereoscopic camera, the PS4 Eye.
Sony has confirmed our report about Vita Remote Play and PlayStation 4 games.
"Yes, it's true unless the game requires specific hardware like the camera," Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida wrote on Twitter in response to a question from a follower. "It will be great to play PS4 games on PS Vita."
Remote Play works by downscaling the 1080p framebuffer to the Vita's native 960x544 resolution, using the PS4's in-built hardware h.264 video encoder to compress the image. This is then beamed out over WiFi to the Vita, which decodes the video and sends back controller inputs to the PlayStation 4. It's effectively OnLive cloud streaming technology relocated to the home - the difference being that image quality issues can be resolved through much higher-bandwidth video, while input latency is cut down considerably owing to the localised nature of the network.
It's all change for PlayStation 4, which features bespoke hardware video encoding for Remote Play, gameplay recording and screen-sharing support with all the benefits of the Gaikai streaming technology. It's a feature built into the operating system itself, incurring no performance penalty to developers. Up until now, the question has been to what extent publishers would want the feature enabled - conceivably, opening up a new library of software for Vita could steal sales from games designed for the system. The news that Sony is mandating support for all titles that don't require the camera takes the choice away from the publishers and ensures a level of consistency in the features that the majority of games offer.
