Steam streaming? Anyone use it?

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413x

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Have been seeing steam streaming coming up in corner of my screen recently and decided to have a look at what it is

Is it too good to be true?

In my case I'm looking at running game on desktop and streaming to htpc
Via powerline

Main rig does work and htpc can display the gfx on TV?
If this is the basic premise what is the catch?

Does the gfx quality follow through? In that I mean will whatever is on the native machine screen look same on the client? As that is the only benefit to me really. My htpc has a 7850 in it but desktop has 280x xfire.

Also, what device handles the controller input? I'm thinking the client takes over here?

This won't be online play so as long as lag doesn't mean.. push button.. Half second later.. Action occurs.. I should be ok
 
I use it all the time - mainly play Strategy/RTS over it. I've got it connected wirelessly so sometimes action games struggle, but that's a network problem rather than the stream quality.
Wireless 360 controller works fine so I'm guessing software does take over. Graphics stream very well.
Just give it a try, not like it costs anything :)
 
Your main/host PC just captures your game, encodes it and sends it to the client as a video.
The only thing your htpc is doing is playing the video and sending control data back to the host.
Graphics quality will be exactly the same, but video quality will suffer a little depending on your settings and speed of your network.
For controls, I just keep my pad connected to the host pc to minimise input lag, but you can connect it to the client if you want.
It works very well for what it is, but I wouldn't use it for any serious gaming.
 
I tried it a while back & wasn't too impressed. Tried again recently from my pc upstairs to the tv downstairs via wireless network, laptop & a wired 360 controller.. Played Alien Isolation & it was pretty much flawless.
 
Just tried it on metro 2033 original and I was getting some weird artefacts. I should have checked the host for them as I don't know where the issue is.

Read that amd cards are less suitable than nvidia. All machines have amd cards
 
I'm debating whether to strip all the power out of my htpc if this works well. It's a lot more powerful than a normal htpc and thus is a bit noisy with 7850.
 
Tried it for the first time this evening, wasn't expecting much after the OnLive debacle (slightly unfair as that over the internet, but even so), and I was more than pleasantly surprised. The lag is pretty close to imperceptible (on wlan) and the video quality is superb, even on the fast setting.

It's really handy for when you aren't at your main PC but fancy a quick game or don't want the sound of the GFX card annoying you. : )
 
I ran my main system with this a few days back and was fairly impressed.

This was over powerline rather than wireless. tried it wireless and it was crap. rubbish for online play too. but for things like assetto corsa etc it is decent.
 
It is what it is.

I used with onboard Radeon HD4000 via powerline and for most game types, is more than playable.

I tried with Arma 3 and unsurprisingly, results were not as good mainly owing to the input lag.
 
It works... but the input lag (at least over powerline) makes playing racing games unplayable which is a real shame, was looking forward to playing AC on my tv :(

Streamed battlefield 4 through it which work fine but again, input lag is an issue.

It's just streaming your main rig screen so graphics are the same, except for when you change the streaming quality, this will of course reduce the quality.

I had it running from an ubuntu steam machine in the front room to my windows gaming machine on the other side of the house, input is controlled by the client, had some issues getting my xbox 360 controller working correctly in ubuntu but this was OS related, not steam.
 
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im gonna put it through its places. i never play online and its a 1080p tv so main rig only has to work with that resolution

main rig still has a purpose

powerline is only one room away which helps the powerline. im using xbox controller plugged into client
 
Mine is wired and for games with a pad it works amazing, if I try games that need a mouse I tend to get input lag, other than that games with a pad work great via streaming. I tend to use it on my old laptop when in bed.
 
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Might have to try this later! Got my house wired up with Ethernet and my little girl keeps trying to have a play of Sonic all star racing in my room.
 
Can someone tell me how you can stream non-steam games from a main desktop PC to a laptop, in particular BF4 and World of Tanks. Would be over a wired network.

Cheers.
 
Snubber said:
Can someone tell me how you can stream non-steam games from a main desktop PC to a laptop, in particular BF4 and World of Tanks. Would be over a wired network.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

Please ignore...just seen that you can add non-steam games to the steam library although no guarantees that they will stream correctly.
 
I've played through all of Brothers A Tale of Two Sons over In Home Streaming and apart from a couple of half-second pauses it streamed flawlessly. For this kind of slower paced game it seems pretty perfect. I also tried Chivalry and Burnout Paradise which were sort of OK but not perfect.

This was with an i3 2100 / 6870 1Gb as the host and an i5 something / Intel 3000 Mac Mini as the client. Host was on a powerline connect, client was on wired Ethernet.

It seems that if your host machine can play the game at 60fps with room to breath and you have a stable (not necessarily fast, just stable) network then the experience is good. I'd say the biggest problem is with games that don't support big picture mode properly i.e. have silly launchers or when a game fails to launch properly and you have to get up from the sofa (and no one wants that) and go to the host pc to sort it out.
 
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