vskid3
Well-Known Member
Who has tried local game streaming with something like the Nvidia Shield or Steam's In Home Streaming? How was it with your setup?
I finally got around to trying out Steam's In Home Streaming today (its in beta, I got my invite about a week after joining the group). I tried it with my desktop (i5 3550, 8GB RAM, GTX 650 Ti 2GB, 1080p) and old gaming laptop (ASUS G60VX, 2.8GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, GTX 260M 1GB, 1366x768) as servers plugged into my router (whatever Time Warner is renting to me, so nothing special) and my Dell Latitude E6400 (2.66GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, Quadro NVS 160M, 1440x900) as the client via wifi.
I've only tested a few games to get an idea of what the performance is like. Portal 2 and TF2 on my desktop seemed to do great. Both were maxed out and still ran smoothly. Having to encode the video at the same time didn't seem to make any difference in performance. I'll try with some more demanding games, but most of mine are a little older (mainly bought at extra discounts during sales). Using wifi on the client's end seemed to work alright. I wouldn't try to compete online, but most single player games should be fine with the latency.
The older ASUS didn't do so great. At 1366x768, Portal 2 and TF2 were pretty much unplayable, even on low settings. They would do about 15-20FPS and the stats showed that it was slow encoding to blame. Lowering the resolution on Portal 2 helped a lot (didn't try it on TF2), I would say it was playable. I tried Osmos, which isn't very demanding, and it worked ok. I was really hoping that I could use the ASUS to stream games to the Dell, as the ASUS's screen broke and the Dell's GPU is meh, but it doesn't look like it'll be able to do much better than playing them directly on the Dell.
Its pretty clear that a good CPU on the server side is a must if you want to play at ~720p or higher. Client specs don't seem to really matter, as long as its somewhat modern. My biggest complaint is that the game has to run in the foreground of the server PC, so I feel like I might as well play directly on the server since no one else could use it anyway. It would also be nice if it allowed you to remotely connect to the other system outside of the games, so you don't have to run to the server if there's something that needs addressed on it.
The only situation that I would use streaming is if my wife is playing a game on the WiiU or 360, which are hooked up to the same TV as the desktop. If I had a dedicated monitor for it, I don't think I would ever use streaming (unless the server could still be used by someone else).
I finally got around to trying out Steam's In Home Streaming today (its in beta, I got my invite about a week after joining the group). I tried it with my desktop (i5 3550, 8GB RAM, GTX 650 Ti 2GB, 1080p) and old gaming laptop (ASUS G60VX, 2.8GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, GTX 260M 1GB, 1366x768) as servers plugged into my router (whatever Time Warner is renting to me, so nothing special) and my Dell Latitude E6400 (2.66GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, Quadro NVS 160M, 1440x900) as the client via wifi.
I've only tested a few games to get an idea of what the performance is like. Portal 2 and TF2 on my desktop seemed to do great. Both were maxed out and still ran smoothly. Having to encode the video at the same time didn't seem to make any difference in performance. I'll try with some more demanding games, but most of mine are a little older (mainly bought at extra discounts during sales). Using wifi on the client's end seemed to work alright. I wouldn't try to compete online, but most single player games should be fine with the latency.
The older ASUS didn't do so great. At 1366x768, Portal 2 and TF2 were pretty much unplayable, even on low settings. They would do about 15-20FPS and the stats showed that it was slow encoding to blame. Lowering the resolution on Portal 2 helped a lot (didn't try it on TF2), I would say it was playable. I tried Osmos, which isn't very demanding, and it worked ok. I was really hoping that I could use the ASUS to stream games to the Dell, as the ASUS's screen broke and the Dell's GPU is meh, but it doesn't look like it'll be able to do much better than playing them directly on the Dell.
Its pretty clear that a good CPU on the server side is a must if you want to play at ~720p or higher. Client specs don't seem to really matter, as long as its somewhat modern. My biggest complaint is that the game has to run in the foreground of the server PC, so I feel like I might as well play directly on the server since no one else could use it anyway. It would also be nice if it allowed you to remotely connect to the other system outside of the games, so you don't have to run to the server if there's something that needs addressed on it.
The only situation that I would use streaming is if my wife is playing a game on the WiiU or 360, which are hooked up to the same TV as the desktop. If I had a dedicated monitor for it, I don't think I would ever use streaming (unless the server could still be used by someone else).
