It sounds almost too good to be true. Marseille’s mCable Gaming Edition is an HDMI cable that promises to improve image quality in your games, adding anti-aliasing and enhanced colour detail to anything that’s thrown at it – at a price. In a world where you can pick up an HDMI cable from a poundshop, the mCable will set you back between $120 to $150, depending on the length you choose. It’s also a North America-only release for now, but Amazon and others can import it for you. Now, we’ve all seen video cables go for ludicrous prices, claiming to give a better picture than the bargain basement equivalents, but the mCable is different, it indeed do the job. The question is to what extent it is effective and how well it processes different types of content.
So what makes this product different? It’s all down to the ASIC processor at the TV end of the cable. This is an 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. Most modern TVs have a USB slot located within short proximity of the HDMI ports, so this isn’t really a problem, but you need to make sure that one is available before you consider buying in.
There are few frills otherwise; on the surface it’s just a thick HDMI lead with an extra line attached. There are no options menus to tweak, and there’s no on/off button to override its post-processing – it’s plug and play with whatever passes through it. Compatibility-wise, the mCable works with several resolutions up to 1080p outputting from the source, so if it receives a 480p, 720p, or 1080p signal, the ASIC automatically kicks in and carries out its processing.
The downside? 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.
Buy the Marseille mCable Gaming Edition from Amazon.
So with all the setup done, what 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.