Marseille mCable Gaming Edition

Hello everyone who is reading this! Alright here is the deal, I was searching around on the internet for some hardware that would boost my, well everything visual to maximize quality of the picture and improve visual development on the modification I am working on and stumbled across the Marseille mCable Gaming Edition which is an advanced HDMI cable that provides

...integrated chip dedicated to processing each frame it receives. Edge detection, artifact removal and colour management are some of the main bullet-points on the box, and this requires power, provided via an integrated USB cable.

The kickbacks this thick HDMI cabble provides are very few and there are no as EuroGamer puts it, tweaks, on/off button to override its post-processing as this is plug-and-play through and through. The mCable work on multiple resolutions at 480p, 720p, and 1080p and it all comes down to the ASIC side (the TV end) when it automatically kick on to carry out the processing.

EuroGamer's Thomas Morgan explains,

"Well, if you feed it an actual 60Hz 4K signal from a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X, it switches off any processing, and passes the picture through as-is. It goes completely untouched, which is a shame. If you're hoping to get upgraded visuals on 4K titles, you're out of luck. Whether it's down to the low USB power requirements of the chip, or just the cost of the cable overall, 4K processing is not on the table here. The cable also supports 1080p input at 120Hz, potentially making it a candidate for PSVR, but we found that placing the cable in between the PS4 and the break-out processor box didn't work - and to be fair, asking the mCable to anti-alias the raw lens-warped output of the console would be too challenging anyway.

So with all the setup done, what does the cable actually do? We've heard claims that the effect is similar to SMAA setting, with Marseille using a proprietary technique it calls contextual anti-aliasing (CXAA). The comparisons do have merit, even if it's not precisely the same. SMAA can be integrated into the rendering pipeline, whereas the mCable only gets the final, flat, 2D output of the console to look at. The mCable can't provide a deeper, engine-level understanding of the game, or an intelligent use of previous frames, similar to temporal anti-aliasing.

What you have instead is all done in post, as a smart algorithm. As a result, the image is cleaned and filtered but there is still visual noise and shimmer. We compared mCable output to FXAA and SMAA in Destiny 2, and found that Marseille's solution didn't blur the image in the way that FXAA does, while anti-aliasing coverage is sometimes better and sometimes worse than the native SMAA solution, depending on the content. However, there are other small tweaks on top, where the mCable's image enhancing features kick in. And this is a mixed blessing as the product can remove aspects like chromatic aberration from certain games - notably Bloodborne - as well as clearing up some unwanted visual noise. For some people it might appear too clean, almost like it's blending parts of the image to excess. All that doesn't happen with regular in-game post-process AA. Similarly, colours are faintly adjusted too: it's nothing radical, manifesting as a very slight shift in hue."

You can read the rest here, but definitely check out the video first!