Digital Foundry recently conducted an experiment to see if Remote Play was worth purchasing a PlayStation Vita for. In it, they pitted the handheld’s ability to stream video from the console to itself against Wii U’s ability to stream video to the GamePad. The conclusion? PS Vita does not compare.

The tech geeks at Digital Foundry say that both the Nvida Shield and the PS Vita stream based on similar principles, all of which Wii U was able to accomplish at a faster rate and at a better image quality.

Digital Foundrry: \”[The PS Vita and the Nvida Shield’s] streaming gameplay set-ups are based on very similar principles: the current frame is grabbed from memory by a hardware encoder, compressed into h.264 video, beamed over WiFi to the handheld, then decoded and displayed on-screen while control inputs are transmitted back to the host. Wii U accomplishes all of this extremely quickly – we ran the GamePad alongside a PlayStation 3D screen with 33ms display lag, and via high-speed photography we noted absolute parity in the refresh. Nvidia’s Shield system offered no direct connection between handheld and PC, but even via a router we noted remarkably swift response – despite a downgraded 30Hz display refresh. Nintendo also took the honours on image quality, with macroblocking artefacting much more noticeable on Shield, mitigated only by the small display.\”

You can read the full analysis and verdict on the official article page.