Plug & play graphics card? (HDMI upscaler)

[cuddles7864]

Just saw an ad for this product

 

First of all they claim that it's essentially a plug in graphics card which makes no sense if you know what a graphics card is. I did a little digging and found out that it's essentially an HDMI post processing thing. It claims to upscale, and add antialiasing which kind of makes sense, but most modern TV's do this anyways so your milage may vary depending on what hardware you are actually running in the first place. But then get this; it also claims to add depth of field effects. Correct me if I'm wrong, but being someone who has spent a good deal of time messing with reshade, I know that you need access to the depth buffer within the graphics api to actually get anything close to good depth of field. So I'm really curious if anyone knows more about how the apparent DOF works on this thing or if that claim is totally offbase. 

Edited May 25, 2020 by cuddles7864
Fixed link

[Statik]

I'm not totally sure how this works or what exactly it does, but it seems like a rip off. They're marketing it as a "GPU upgrade" like upgrading your PC's GPU, but that's not the case. It looks like a little HDMI device which upscales resolutions (upscaled 4k isn't the same as native 4k...), and maybe adds a few effects. I would've liked to see the price, but overall it kind of seems like they're marketing to be something that it's not.

[Jurrunio]

It can tune the colors as well I suppose

[cuddles7864]

10 minutes ago, Statik said:

I'm not totally sure how this works or what exactly it does, but it seems like a rip off. They're marketing it as a "GPU upgrade" like upgrading your PC's GPU, but that's not the case. It looks like a little HDMI device which upscales resolutions (upscaled 4k isn't the same as native 4k...), and maybe adds a few effects. I would've liked to see the price, but overall it kind of seems like they're marketing to be something that it's not.

Yeah you're totally right. Obviously their claims don't make any sense. I don't doubt that it can upscale, although it will probably be negligible if you even have a 1080p signal. The upscaling and antialiasing claims make a little bit of sense because I've already seen similar products that do that, but the thing that really got me was the depth of field since I know that's essentially impossible without access to the depth buffer. 

[Statik]

Just now, cuddles7864 said:

Yeah you're totally right. Obviously their claims don't make any sense. I don't doubt that it can upscale, although it will probably be negligible if you even have a 1080p signal. The upscaling and antialiasing claims make a little bit of sense because I've already seen similar products that do that, but the thing that really got me was the depth of field since I know that's essentially impossible without access to the depth buffer. 

Yeah I'm not too sure about the depth of field, as that's not really my ballpark, but it appears it's just another gimmic of sorts whos main audience is people who don't have a full understanding of how their hardware works.

[PlayStation 2]

"Graphics card" probably isn't the best way to refer to this, but it is a graphics processor of some sort. It basically does a post-processing form of anti-aliasing (think something like FXAA). It can serve as a decent enough upscaler, if needed, but if you're buying this just to upscale, say, an older console, might as well buy a Retrotink2x or an OSSC.

You also could add a depth-of-field effect with something like this, but that being said, I don't really think many people have tested it, nor would it probably work all that well.