PS4 News, Update and Rumors: PS4’s Remote Play extending capabilities to PC

Sony has implemented remote play via PC, Mac and Windows 10 platforms for the PS4's 3.5 update. A quick sneak-peak on the PS4 remote play revealed options and the resolution along with the frame-rates in which they can be played. It's noted that your bandwidth speed between your router and devices will determine how fast you can stream in-home, and your general net connection will determine how fast you'll be able to remote play for devices not connected to the router. The resolutions can range from 360p to outright HD 720p resolutions default at 540p. The frame rates are default at 30fps with a potential boost of up to 60fps. It's worth noting that now both the Xbox One and PS4 support remote play through PCs. However, what's interesting is that despite the PS4 typically having higher resolution games than the Xbox One, the remote streaming options don't support those resolutions yet.

Back in August 2015, some users tweaked with the settings in the Xbox One's in-home streaming menus to their Windows 10 PCs and unlock the 1080 at 60fps resolution and frame-rate option. Essentially, Xbox One owners could stream games on very high settings, maxing out the resolution and FPS equivalent to the highest-end console games that make use of those specifications.The interesting part about it was not just the hardware capabilities of the PC but also the bandwidth throughput from the end-user's ISP and network hardware. Some PC and Xbox One owners managed to boost up the quality of the streams to support 1080p at 60fps, but it capped at 13mbps. Sony will have to step their game up in this area because they're essentially trying to catch up to Microsoft. It's now good that that the PS4 finally has this feature but it's a shame it's so low-end. The inclusion of remote play isn't the only thing present in update 3.5, though. Sony released a quick video discussing some of the other features as well, such as new notification options and sharing capabilities.

The new notification feature is something a lot of gamers have been demanding for a long time, because they sometimes have to pretend to appear offline to avoid being interrupted when playing a game. That's now facilitated. For the more socially-oriented gamers, there's the new multiplayer event features that allows PS4 owners to create groups and invite friends to those groups to play games at specific times. You can even share group and events on the community page to find new friends, enemies, rivals and allies.

"Remote Play (PC and Mac)With this update, we're expanding PS4's Remote Play capabilities to work with PC and Mac giving you more freedom and flexibility to play your PS4.

Remote Play on Mac / PC is compatible with the following system software:

Windows 8.1
Windows 10 or later
OS X 10.10
OS X 10.11

You'll be able to select from the following resolution and frame rate options, depending on your Internet bandwidth. You can use one DUALSHOCK 4 as the controller for Remote Play, which needs to be connected via a USB cable." Sony's blog post read.