Last week we mentioned in a news-item that only the new and upcoming Kaby Lake processors would be able to handly Netflix in Ultra HD on a Windows PC in combination with Microsoft’s Edge browser. This has now been tested with graphics cards.

German website Heise tested a number of hardware configurations in relation to 4K streaming, as it turns out modern graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 1000 series and Radeon RX 400 series can’t display Netflix’s 4K content. Streaming 4K content is limited to Microsoft’s Edge browser solely, it is rediculous that it cannot even be watched with the official Windows 10 Netflix app (word however is that Netflix is working on this APP wise).

Netflix only switched to the 4K resolution when an Intel CPU of the 7th generation (Kaby Lake) is available. Now it is not something the graphics cards couldn't handle, but it's more a PlayReady 3.0 copy protection thing as the GPU or driver needs to support PlayReady 3.0 SL3000 and HDCP 2.2 copy protections.

Heise sums it is very simple, ” it’s astonishing that modern AMD-Polaris and Nvidia-Pascal graphics cards are not supported, although they support HDMI 2.0b and HDCP 2.2″. We think support will be added in the not so far future, AMD previously told Heise that Polaris should get PlayReady 3.0 support through a driver update.