Would you spend north of $100 on an HDMI that promises better visuals? If so, there are plenty of options out there, many of them from Monster. One that is a little different, however, is Marseille's mCable Gaming Edition. What separates this HDMI cable from other high-priced offerings is an embedded video signal chip that offers contextual anti-aliasing.
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Sounds like bullshit, right? Maybe, or maybe not—while we haven't tested it ourselves, the folks at PCPerspective have and they came away impressed. While admitting it sounds odd, the site found a "noticeable difference in image quality" when swapping out a regular HDMI cable for the mCable Gaming Edition. And true to the company's claim, the site observed no measurable increase in lag.
The fancy cable works its mojo with a post-process AA algorithm that is applied to the image before spitting it out on the screen. It supports framerates up to 120 fps at 1080p.
So who exactly is this for? It's mostly aimed at console gamers. Marseille says "there is not enough processing power left inside the console to mitigate aliasing," leaving a need for an outside-the-box solution. Hence the mCable Gaming Edition.
Here is a look at an image plucked from a PlayStation 3:
And here is one from an Xbox 360:
"Gaming consoles have a problem: they can't draw very well," Marseille says. "Even if they're high powered, they still miss a lot of key details because all processors are physically limited, leading to insufficient sampling resolution and framerate, which leads to common 'artifacts' such as jagged edges and shimmering textures."
That said, you could use this with a PC and monitor (or TV). You probably shouldn't, though, as most games already offer built-in AA options. We suppose there could be a market in the PC sector for gamers who own an under powered graphics card, but even then, the $119 asking price (for a 3-foot cable; the 6-foot version is $129, and the 9-foot version is $139) would be better spent on a GPU upgrade.
