PlayStation Vita Remote Play: the Digital Foundry verdict
It was perhaps a bit much to hope that Vita Remote Play could match up to the Wii U GamePad, or even Nvidia Shield's performance. Nintendo built its system around its controller - ultra low latency was built into the design, while Vita Remote Play simply doesn't have that priority for Sony. With regards Shield, as details come to light on the Kepler GPU's onboard video encode architecture, we see a design
built from the ground-up for low-latency image acquisition, along with high-speed hardware h.264 encoding - a system that has
attracted plenty of praise from luminaries in the real-time capture field (Unwinder is the man behind MSI Afterburner). This is technology derived from GeForce GRID, Nvidia's cloud gaming system - so just like the Wii U GamePad, it's built for precisely this task.
"As it stands, PS4's Vita Remote Play functionality is a really cool value-added extra, but while fun, it can't really be compared with the Wii U GamePad experience."
The hardware encoders and surrounding pipelines built into both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 seem to be less sophisticated - absolutely fine for the clip-sharing and live-streaming functions they were primarily designed for, but with results falling short for ultra-low latency real-time transmission that Vita Remote Play demands for optimal performance.
The metrics aren't as good as we were hoping for, but we do have to stress that what feels laggy for one person could feel absolutely fine for another - what we've attempted to do here is to back our observations with hard numbers using proven methodology. The experience will change from game to game too: the lower the input lag on the title, the better the Remote Play experience is likely to be. Call of Duty prides itself on its low latency controls and the game felt OK when we played it via Vita, but Resogun just felt
wrong in all of our testing across multiple connections, PS4s, Vitas and routers. On the flipside, Assassin's Creed 4 is generally quite latency tolerant anyway, and that worked fine for the most part, though once you see the lag, it's really difficult to "unsee". Rarely has the phrase "your mileage may vary" felt so apt.
However, whether we're talking about image quality, latency, frame-rate - or the simple fact that 1080p gaming doesn't always translate well to a five-inch screen - we couldn't help but feel that we were getting a less than ideal experience, and that nothing compares to just picking up the Dual Shock 4 and playing PS4 games in the conventional way. Perhaps - like the mooted Nvidia Shield enhancements - we'll see significant improvements to the functionality over time. However, in the here and now, Vita Remote Play is a cute function that's useful for some games but not for others - and right now we definitely see it as a cool value-added extra rather than the saviour of Sony's brilliant - but beleaguered - handheld.
the controls fukked me up while the latency was pretty next to nil in the spots I've done it away from home. 
