Steam in-home streaming released. (You can play any game on super low end PCs.)

[5150Joker]

Right. You need to actually run the game on a decent rig, then stream it to other devices close by, a laptop, TV, or whatever.

It's basically a much complex and convoluted way of streaming across a HDMI cable, fairly limited use quite frankly, it's only real purpose is to make up for the fact that steam machine cannot play most of the windows game in the living room and can stream them from your PC.

Most people who want to do that such as myself invested £20 in a HDMI cable and wireless controller like a decade ago.

I just spent all night yesterday streaming from my desktop to my TV. Limited concept my ass! Using my Asus RT-AC68U router, there was basically no packet loss and little to no lag in most of the games. This basically negates the need for any consoles because anyone in a home or decent sized apartment can just stream from their desktop to their home theater and game on the couch using xbox 360 controllers. For those of you getting mixed results, you MUST be on an N wireless router minimum and at least have the receiving laptop to have some form of hardware decoding for the best results. I'm pushing 60 fps in games like Borderlands 2 with no perceivable input lag or quality loss--I'll try to record it tonight using my 1520 and put up the vids on youtube.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Actually, the title of this thread is misleading. You cant really play a demanding game on a super low end PC. You still have to have a powerful PC to run the game and stream it to the low end PC. Not trying to argue semantics, but it is a significant difference.

Anyway, the only was this would really interest me is if you could stream from the cloud, so that you would not need a powerful PC at all and could play for instance on a laptop from anywhere you could connect to fast enough internet. I know this has been tried and latency is too high, but maybe someday (5 or 10 years?) it will be possible.

 

[Aikouka]

Actually, the title of this thread is misleading. You cant really play a demanding game on a super low end PC. You still have to have a powerful PC to run the game and stream it to the low end PC. Not trying to argue semantics, but it is a significant difference.

"On" vs. "through", arguing semantics is hardly worth it and is just a waste of time. Anyone reading more than the thread title will understand the point.

Anyway, the only was this would really interest me is if you could stream from the cloud, so that you would not need a powerful PC at all and could play for instance on a laptop from anywhere you could connect to fast enough internet. I know this has been tried and latency is too high, but maybe someday (5 or 10 years?) it will be possible.

...it's quite possible today. The issue has to do with the old business saying, "location! location! location!" No matter what you do, you cannot overcome distance in regard to transmission. Even if you use light (fiber optics), you have to keep in mind that light travels at 299,792,458 m/s. "But aikouka, that's super fast!" Unfortunately, the distance from New York to Los Angeles is around 3000 miles or 4800km, which introduces 16ms of latency with a direct connection. That doesn't even include the fact that you have switching hardware that introduces latency into the equation as well.

However, that's the reason why location is important. The closer you are to major hubs, the less hops (switching) you'll have to make and the less distance you may have to cover. I tried playing off an NVIDIA GRID server in California using my Shield, and while it worked, I suffered from about 100ms+ of latency. Street Fighter IV was playable, but you could definitely notice that my character's movement was lagged. However, I streamed Resogun from my PS4 to my Vita while connected through my smartphone from across town, and I had no problem playing the game. That situation shows that even with relatively lackluster hardware and inherently laggy wireless, I was able to have a decent gaming session.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I just spent all night yesterday streaming from my desktop to my TV. Limited concept my ass! Using my Asus RT-AC68U router, there was basically no packet loss and little to no lag in most of the games. This basically negates the need for any consoles because anyone in a home or decent sized apartment can just stream from their desktop to their home theater and game on the couch using xbox 360 controllers. For those of you getting mixed results, you MUST be on an N wireless router minimum and at least have the receiving laptop to have some form of hardware decoding for the best results. I'm pushing 60 fps in games like Borderlands 2 with no perceivable input lag or quality loss--I'll try to record it tonight using my 1520 and put up the vids on youtube.

Right, and about a million PC gamers have been doing this for a decade with HDMI cables and wireless controllers, I play on my home theater setup (projector + home cinema 5.1) with a HDMI cable run from my gaming PC + PS3 controllers over blutooth and have done for many years.

Bluetooth USB dongle is about £3 and HDMI Cable is about £15

Do you know what the packet loss and lag on a HDMI cable is? (Hint: it's zero)

 

[gus6464]

You guys think a ~$200 AMD mitx APU build will be enough for most games on the receiver end? The ability to stream all my fighting games to my TV and be able to use my fightstick would be awesome.

 

[Gunbuster]

This would be perfect for them to cram into the Amazon Fire TV.

Valve & Amazon get talking!

 

[EDUSAN]

ill have to give this a chance... but from where i am from i fear for my uploading speeding to stream a game. ill have to give it a try though

is there a tutorial on how to make it work somewhere?

 

[frowertr]

Right, and about a million PC gamers have been doing this for a decade with HDMI cables and wireless controllers, I play on my home theater setup (projector + home cinema 5.1) with a HDMI cable run from my gaming PC + PS3 controllers over blutooth and have done for many years.

Bluetooth USB dongle is about £3 and HDMI Cable is about £15

Do you know what the packet loss and lag on a HDMI cable is? (Hint: it's zero)

This is all well and good if your PC is near your living room. I'd need a 50' HDMI cable to make the run to my living room from my office/game room and I would have to string it out throughout the house each time I wanted to use it.

When I built my house, I had Cat5e installed into each room and ran it back to a central closet so that I could connect each room just for reasons of streaming content around the house without messing with ungainly HDMI cables strung in hallways.


Not sure I understand the hate for this product to be honest. Don't use it if you don't think you have a need. It's that simple.

 

[codyray10]

Has anyone tried this with Linux being the receiving box yet? My HTPC runs Mint, thinking about trying it out.

 

[EDUSAN]

does the streaming need to be on a local network?

cant i have a pc running a game at home and playing it on a friends home with a notebook?

 

[codyray10]

does the streaming need to be on a local network?

cant i have a pc running a game at home and playing it on a friends home with a notebook?

Yes, it's only for streaming over the LAN

 

[cbrunny]

Gave it a try last night with Lego Marvel & Skyrim. GPU pc is a FX8350 & 2x 7970 OC; Receiving pc is a pretty basic HTPC, but it does have a Phenom II X6 in it & I think a 6450 passive. Used a game pad - an XBOX 360 clone.

LAN is wired gigabit with ASUS RT-N56U via a 500mbps Powerline (GPU PC -> RT-N56U -> Powerline -> HTPC; full gigabit save for Powerline adapter). Streaming HD video with no issues on a regular basis, very solid connection well over 100mbps between the computers.

Lego Marvel:
- It's a pretty bad PC port to begin with, so it has graphical issues when played on a normal pc (for me anyway). Streaming did not make these worse.
- response time was pretty good. It was noticeably laggy, but very very minimally. After a few mins I stopped noticing.
- Some packet loss in video and more than a little bit of packet loss in audio. More in audio than video. Not horrible but every 20 secs or so would stutter.
- I smashed stuff as the Hulk for a bit.

Skyrim:
- Immediately noticed the colours were very washed out. I had settings maxed, but the res is 720p on the tv i was playing on. 60 hz.
- Lag on input was noticeable but not really relevant.
- same packet loss patterns as above.

In both cases, framerates were strong & constant, save for the packet loss. Easily playable regularly if you're willing to overlook a few bits of packet loss here and there.

I admit, for a beta I'm impressed. It's cool tech, and I'm looking forward to having these bugs ironed out a bit more. Good stuff Valve!

 

[SlitheryDee]

I like this idea. When the bugs are all worked out of it I may change out my HTPC with something ultra small and quiet and just stream all my games to it. It's kind of cool to be able to build a crazy high end system with absolutely no regard for size and noise and then be able to use all that power from a tiny and silent mini-itx system sitting in your entertainment center.

 

[TeknoBug]

Oh my... gonna try F1 2013 and Assetto Corsa from my PC to my HTPC laptop on my TV.

Using an AC-1200 router so bandwidth shouldn't be an issue.

 

[gus6464]

Why is Nintendo's implementation of this on the Wii U flawless vs the others? It's using the same tech.

 

[Tweak155]

Why is Nintendo's implementation of this on the Wii U flawless vs the others? It's using the same tech.

Less demanding?

 

[TeknoBug]

Just tested a few games, even added a couple non-Steam games like Madden 08 and plays well but a little bitch of fps hitching, not that it's bad but it's a bit annoying.

 

[Topweasel]

Less demanding?

Yeah does a single first party game get processed at 1080? Pretty sure if its still doing work at 480 and up-converting, its only going to send compressed 480 info to another device.

Edit:
Take it back. Looks like its better then I thought. Not a lot but there are a few.

That said with Nintendo to Nintendo or Sony to Sony. They are single platforms to single platforms that are completely proprietary and in their control. This side neither machine is a standard platform outside being X86 computers. Not only that but the games aren't even written to access the hardware the same way. The amount of variations is mind boggling. So it's easy to see why they wouldn't be comparable.

 

[pauldun170]

So in a multi PC\laptop house
Dad can have the monster gaming PC, everyone else can have a crappy Dell.
No more buying expensive gaming desktops or laptops for the kids.
I no longer have to care about the OS other than the Steam host box.

One PC to rule them all.

In the case that there are multiple high end rigs in the house, you can spread your installs out. Same games installed on one, some on the other.

 

[Aikouka]

Why is Nintendo's implementation of this on the Wii U flawless vs the others? It's using the same tech.

Do you own a Wii U? I have to ask, because in my experience, the Wii U's wireless streaming is far from flawless. If I walk outside of my living room, I get a warning about a weak signal, and if I even take one step up my stairs, the signal cuts out completely. I have walked maybe about 20 feet.

My question for anyone having issues: have you configured it? There are quality settings for streaming, and if your situation is less than ideal (i.e. not full 802.3z Ethernet Gig-E), then you may want to consider reducing the quality a little bit. Back when I tried it over full Gig-E with 2 switches throughout the path from streamer to streamee, I saw no dropped frames and no visual degradation at the highest settings, but that's expected when you have around 120MB/s of bandwidth!

You guys think a ~$200 AMD mitx APU build will be enough for most games on the receiver end? The ability to stream all my fighting games to my TV and be able to use my fightstick would be awesome.

The most important requirement for streaming is hardware decoding for h.264 video, and I'm assuming that your AMD APU has their UVD

 

[gus6464]

Do you own a Wii U? I have to ask, because in my experience, the Wii U's wireless streaming is far from flawless. If I walk outside of my living room, I get a warning about a weak signal, and if I even take one step up my stairs, the signal cuts out completely. I have walked maybe about 20 feet.

My question for anyone having issues: have you configured it? There are quality settings for streaming, and if your situation is less than ideal (i.e. not full 802.3z Ethernet Gig-E), then you may want to consider reducing the quality a little bit. Back when I tried it over full Gig-E with 2 switches throughout the path from streamer to streamee, I saw no dropped frames and no visual degradation at the highest settings, but that's expected when you have around 120MB/s of bandwidth!



The most important requirement for streaming is hardware decoding for h.264 video, and I'm assuming that your AMD APU has their UVD

I do own a Wii U and while the signal only goes about 30ft at the most, if you are within the signal range it is flawless. I am not comparing the signal range, I am comparing the performance within the spec'd parameters.

 

[Aikouka]

I do own a Wii U and while the signal only goes about 30ft at the most, if you are within the signal range it is flawless. I am not comparing the signal range, I am comparing the performance within the spec'd parameters.

So, are you comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges? The Wii U's gamepad is only 854x480. If you're attempting to stream 1080p, you are streaming at least 5 times as much data ((1920 * 1080) / (854 * 480)). That's only a rudimentary calculation as it doesn't take into account video quality (bitrate), color depth, or the audio track.

The only advantage that I can say that Nintendo's implementation has is that there's no concept of a time slice (not the proper term, but it works). Well, that's sort of wrong, but I'll explain. Okay, so WiFi --like a lot of other wireless technologies -- uses radio transmissions to send data. So, ignoring newer technologies like UM-MIMO (multi-user beamforming), the wireless access point must divide its radio transmission time between each device that is requesting data. The Wii U Gamepad uses a variant of the 802.11 spec to create its connection with the Wii U, and the advantage is that it's the only client. There is no concept of it having to service the kiddos watching YouTube or Netflix on their iDevices prior to sending the data to your streaming client.

In a lot of cases, that may not affect most people unless their routers are really bogged down, but it will introduce slight bits of latency. To give you an idea, PS4 Streaming with the Vita works like Steam's streaming, and I have no qualms with it. It also transmits at a far lower resolution similar to the Gamepad.

 

[gorcorps]

You guys think a ~$200 AMD mitx APU build will be enough for most games on the receiver end? The ability to stream all my fighting games to my TV and be able to use my fightstick would be awesome.

With the frame timing you need to be successful in fighting games, that's about the worst genre you could ask to use this tech for.

 

[TeknoBug]

Yeah there's a touch of input lag, not a big deal in MMO or sports games, and some racing games are fine (I adapted to it quickly in F1 2013 and Assetto Corsa). But it's horrible for twich FPS games like Planetside 2, Insurgency or Battlefield.

On another note, not all games actually render on the stream, I get a black screen in GW2 and no launcher window in SWTOR and basically nothing with Race 07.

But there's a bright future in in-home streaming.

 

[ControlD]

This is all well and good if your PC is near your living room. I'd need a 50' HDMI cable to make the run to my living room from my office/game room and I would have to string it out throughout the house each time I wanted to use it.

This. If you live in a multi floor dwelling using a HDMI cable and a wireless controller isn't much of an option.