Playstation 4: Remote Play to PC needs Some Work

The ability to extend your Playstation 4 to computers was released today to support both PC and Mac operating systems so I decided to give this great capability a try. This is of course the first effort from Playstation to bring the ability to play the games on PC devices during the generation and it generally works really well. It's almost too simple to set-up and I'll link to the download page below so you can give the application a try for yourself. To get the streaming going you just need to select some options on the PS4 and then run the application on PC with the PS4 controller plugged in via USB. Those settings and everything are found on the application download page along with troubleshooting techniques as I heard some are having problems and I also included a video guide I made in case you need visual assistance with it. With that out of the way I'm going to go over how well the tests went with streaming my Playstation 4 to my Windows 10 PC with a 4k Monitor. Note: the picture below was captured on PC streaming The Uncharted Collection on PS4.





When running the application it's actually tiny in size which is great, I had it running and installed with a minute or two. This is where we get to a somewhat disappointing aspect which is the quality of streaming available at the current moment. There are only three resolution settings available with standard being 540p, the low end if 360p and the highest end is only 720p. Along with resolution there are two options for frame rate with high and standard. I was easily able to run all the high end features as my internet is decent enough at 52/12mb though the quality is clearly visible as being sub-par when doing direct comparisons of the console to the PC stream connection. Running 720p on a 4k Monitor or even a standard HD monitor makes it look fuzzy and they need a better resolution option available. When comparing this offering to Xbox One app streaming which does clear 1080 over the network you can see the difference there and I hope they work towards that. For now it works fine and I can see it being great for tablet devices that are capable of running it. The application also has some extra Windows features such as a box that you can drag to whatever size is needed, it's able to be put fullscreen and has key controller buttons built right into the mouse options without needing the controller. It'll be great to play some games on the console while watching Netflix on my Xbox while doing so. I also noticed some graphical issues in some of the games with certain moments being choppy and I'm assuming it's the application where it's not quite optimized yet since my connection and PC build should be more than able to handle a higher resolution than available. It's a decent start for PS4 Remote Play on the PC, but it definitely does need some work in terms of optimization and resolution options to make it function better on the PC side of things.

Download the Playstation 4 Remote Play Here (PC or Mac)

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