OK - so my posty brought me a nice little box from amazon today, which included the aforementioned mCable that I'd pulled the trigger on and promised to let y'all know how I fared with it, and its a bit of a mixed verdict.
Heads up - this may turn into a wall of text as I explain my thorough testing procedure...
My purpose for buying it was to go between my graphics card and the oculus rift to utilise the hardware AA of the mcables microprocessor to liberate a few Frames Per Second to allow me back out of my exile in solo, where I've been living since I discovered how good 1.75 HMD supersampling makes the game look (2.0 looks better but even my 1080ti struggles with that). This was a resolute failure as the cable doesn't support the oculus's 1920*1200 resolution. But in the interest of science I tried the cable between my gfx card and my "monitor" which is a 65" 4k Samsung TV. Again it was a mixed bag here too, giving some benefits and some side effects. When running at 3840*2160 on the desktop the effects were minimal, however there was a definite improvement on screen text, the sort of thing that microsoft's cleartype could only dream of, and when really zoomed in on pictures you could see the antialiasing in the mCable's processor doing its thing to smooth out some of the jaggies. So that was a plus, but swiftly balanced when I noticed that the black --> alpha blended stardock fences / rainmeter skins I have were now showing distinct colour banding... "Aha!" thinks I, "dynamic range is now limited" and low and behold when I fired up the nvidia control panel, dynamic range was limited, however when I have the monitor hooked up directly ie normal cable rather than mCable, I can select the colour mode and if I use RGB rather than any of the Y_Cb_Cr colour modes I can select dynamic range, but using the mCable I was limited to one Y_Cb_Cr mode so stuck in limited dynamic range, hence the shonky blacks. But that is as much to do with nvidias drivers having issues with HDMI as it is with anything else.
When I fired up elite, in desktop mode, at 1920*1080@60Hz fullscreen, and as the dynamic range was limited, the blues fading around the logo were wonky on the splash screen, but when I got to main menu I could see an improvement, and when I got into the cockpit in the hangar the improvement was immense, gone were the jaggies in the hangar. I went and launched - I was at ram tah's base - and did some manoeuvres around the base, including the central skyscraper, rolled relative to it at numerous angles, and jaggies were gone, however the shimmering/flickering in and out aliasing bug we get in elite was still present, though not as pronounced. I then took the ship the nearest orbital, and it was evident in places that the mCables AA didnt quite know what to make of the rotating station, as some parts were beautifully smooth, and others were even more ragged than really low resolution screens. I then landed at that station, and inside the docking barrel, the mCables AA was working well with all the diagonal lines in the stations interior while not perfect certainly a lot better than before.
Once docked I switched settings to 3840*2160'60Hz Fullscreen, and launched and had a look about the inside of the barell and the outside of the station. Inside the barrel it was quite good, but definitely laggier than before, which wasn't down to the GFX card as I was still rocking a rock solid 60FPS (which I'd set as my frame rate limit), when I got outside the barrel, that was where the mCable's processor simply unravelled. The rotating bits of the stations body, like the toast rack and the supports for the glowing rings, and such like, they were a glitchy mess, with blocks of the image lagging out, like trying to watch a video on youtube via a dialup connection(?) and since there was a fight outside the station with the cops shooting a wanted NPC as the polygon count went up so did the number of glitches on the display. At that point I removed the mCable and put it back in the box, with the intention of returning it to amazon for a refund under distance sellers regs.
So, the ubiquitous TL;DR - For VR - Forget it, for High End PC's or High Resolution displays, forget it, If you are rocking a lower spec PC there could be a case for this Cable, even though you'd probably be best served getting a better graphics card for it as opposed to trying to soup it up with a post processor. And for a console, it could be invaluable, and overall while it doesn't fit in with my set up, I can see it being useful to others. It is also worth noting that if it weren't for the fact it forced my main screen into limited dynamic range (most probably an nvidia issue) I'd have most likely kept the cable, such was the enhancement it made to text / zoomed pictures.
