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

[Topweasel]

I'm not sure how many more times we can say that there are those of us that can't run an HDMI cable to another part of the house.

You would think that the PC gamer threads would jump all over emerging tech that kept people playing Pc games. Instead you got people judging people playing habits and attacking its flexibility. Silly and shortsighted indeed.

 

[CU]

If all this is doing is decoding would an Intel J1900/J1800 be enough to do it. That would seem like the perfect cheap and silent client for this.

 

[Topweasel]

If all this is doing is decoding would an Intel J1900/J1800 be enough to do it. That would seem like the perfect cheap and silent client for this.

It might. These seem like great opportunities for some Nuc and newer net tops. Do these have Quicksync, kind of out of the loop on the Atom based Intel options.

Would like to see them eventually support decoding on Radeons. Would make a perfect market for some Kabini machines.

 

[CU]

Yes the J1900/J1800 support Quicksync.

 

[Topweasel]

Yes the J1900/J1800 support Quicksync.

Then yeah I would think that would work well with this.

 

[frowertr]

I'd probably go with a Gigabyte Brix i3 if I were building out another HTPC. It easily handles HD video so it shouldn't have any trouble streaming.

 

[TeknoBug]

Spent more time playing some of my games streaming to my laptop (AMD A4 5000, 1.5GHz quad core), I set stream quality on client to "beautiful" then set prioritize network on host and it plays no problems through my AC1200 router. I should try hardware decoding on another intel PC to see what difference it makes.

^ the Brix i3 sounds like the best bet for an all-round HTPC/stream game unit.

 

[frozentundra123456]

You would think that the PC gamer threads would jump all over emerging tech that kept people playing Pc games. Instead you got people judging people playing habits and attacking its flexibility. Silly and shortsighted indeed.

I am not sure how it "keeps people playing" PC games. I allows someone with a competent gaming PC to stream to another device. At the same time, it ties up 2 PCs to play one game. It doesnt mean that someone with a laptop with intel integrated graphics is suddenly going to be able to play a demanding PC game unless they already have another PC capable of playing it.

Each person has different ways to play, I dont think it is fair to call someone shortsighted or silly to not embrace this technology. I suppose if you have a really nice TV to stream to, it is useful. But personally, I would just prefer to play on my gaming PC directly, since my TV is kind of crap anyway, and I dont have a laptop, and dont see the point of streaming from a pc with a large monitor to a laptop in any case. Now if you could stream from the cloud to a low end PC directly, that would change the landscape.

 

[TerryMathews]

Each person has different ways to play, I dont think it is fair to call someone shortsighted or silly to not embrace this technology. I suppose if you have a really nice TV to stream to, it is useful. But personally, I would just prefer to play on my gaming PC directly, since my TV is kind of crap anyway, and I dont have a laptop, and dont see the point of streaming from a pc with a large monitor to a laptop in any case. Now if you could stream from the cloud to a low end PC directly, that would change the landscape.

Why are you unable to realize that not everyone is in your situation?

You don't even allow for different kinds of scenarios. For example, playing Crisis 3 via streaming on your TV might not make sense. How about You Don't Know Jack at a house party?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Why are you unable to realize that not everyone is in your situation?

You don't even allow for different kinds of scenarios. For example, playing Crisis 3 via streaming on your TV might not make sense. How about You Don't Know Jack at a house party?

I could ask you the same question. Why do you (and a few other posters in this thread) seem to think everyone should embrace this technology? Why do you not realize "not everyone is in *your* situation"?

There are plenty of scenarios, for those who find it useful, more power to them. It is no skin off my back if someone wants to stream games. On the other hand, it is also perfectly legitimate for someone to feel that the technology is not useful for them, and to voice their opinions as to the shortcomings of the technology.

That hardly makes them "silly and shortsighted" as another poster explicitly stated.

 

[TerryMathews]

I could ask you the same question. Why do you (and a few other posters in this thread) seem to think everyone should embrace this technology? Why do you not realize "not everyone is in *your* situation"?

There are plenty of scenarios, for those who find it useful, more power to them. It is no skin off my back if someone wants to stream games. On the other hand, it is also perfectly legitimate for someone to feel that the technology is not useful for them, and to voice their opinions as to the shortcomings of the technology.

That hardly makes them "silly and shortsighted" as another poster explicitly stated.

I said the position you and Bober were espousing was short-sighted. I stand behind that comment. Let's review:

Why on earth would you want to stream that to an 8 inch tablet? Overall, it is a nice feature, since it costs nothing, but I just see limited applications.

The rest of the thread has just been a few of you circle-jerking each other about how useless this feature is, as though it's consuming the last of your 640KB of RAM. Guess what? My "competent gaming PC" has enough memory to allow me to toggle this feature on and off. I imagine yours does as well.

You seem to be misinterpreting the posts we have been making. This feature is not for everyone nor every situation. It is, however, far from useless since it does allow you to get a gaming experience into an area where it might otherwise be infeasible.

Those of us celebrating this feature are talking about how innovative it is, being able to stream to effectively any PC with enough bandwidth. Not that everyone should use it, but recognizing that some people will find it quite useful. I don't understand why that bothers you?

 

[Topweasel]

I am not sure how it "keeps people playing" PC games. I allows someone with a competent gaming PC to stream to another device. At the same time, it ties up 2 PCs to play one game. It doesnt mean that someone with a laptop with intel integrated graphics is suddenly going to be able to play a demanding PC game unless they already have another PC capable of playing it.

Each person has different ways to play, I dont think it is fair to call someone shortsighted or silly to not embrace this technology. I suppose if you have a really nice TV to stream to, it is useful. But personally, I would just prefer to play on my gaming PC directly, since my TV is kind of crap anyway, and I dont have a laptop, and dont see the point of streaming from a pc with a large monitor to a laptop in any case. Now if you could stream from the cloud to a low end PC directly, that would change the landscape.

I am not telling you to adopt the technology. That's just as shortsighted. I am saying that not embracing the PC's platform for flexibility one that make PC gaming that more accessible to people at that.

Take my setup for example. I have a TV in my bedroom, I have a TV in the living room. My room mate has a TV in his bedroom. Can you guess where my main computer with it's nice Video card is at? Not in any of those three rooms. It's in an office and my setup is pretty decent for competitive play. But guess what, its not the greatest place to sit back and play a nice SP game. My room is #1 and the living room #2. Both of which are horrible places to put my PC. So what would a normal person do, they would get the game on their PS or XB if they could and play it in comfort. I know I have made that choice before.

If I am going to get a gaming system for my room am I going to spend $800-$1600 on full blown gaming computer or $300-$500 console? Console wins by far. It's cheaper and a lot easier to deal with. But if I could play a computer game even with it's compatibility hurtles on $300-$500 system at full resolution and features that my main computer can handle, then it's a whole new ball game.

I think a lot of people aren't accounting for the large amount of people that have good machines, but because of kids, pets, aesthetics, and core usage of the PC, don't want or can't have their primary computer connected to the TV. Pushing them to choose a game console and console versions of certain game types. But if I told them for $400 I can get a PC you can watch video's, browse the web, and play their games as well their desktop, and better then the console version I think people would jump on it.

As for the guy that talked about an 8inch tablet to play games. I can think of several. Civ V and Xcom jump right out. It would be nice to sit on a couch and take my turns during breaks while playing on 8" Atom tablet.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I said the position you and Bober were espousing was short-sighted. I stand behind that comment. Let's review:



The rest of the thread has just been a few of you circle-jerking each other about how useless this feature is, as though it's consuming the last of your 640KB of RAM. Guess what? My "competent gaming PC" has enough memory to allow me to toggle this feature on and off. I imagine yours does as well.

You seem to be misinterpreting the posts we have been making. This feature is not for everyone nor every situation. It is, however, far from useless since it does allow you to get a gaming experience into an area where it might otherwise be infeasible.

Those of us celebrating this feature are talking about how innovative it is, being able to stream to effectively any PC with enough bandwidth. Not that everyone should use it, but recognizing that some people will find it quite useful. I don't understand why that bothers you?

Would you care to highlight the part of my post where I said it was "useless"? Talk about misinterpreting, you are outright putting words into my mouth that I didnt say.

This whole argument is becoming pointless, however. I am not posting any further on this. If that means you think you "won", fine.

 

[TerryMathews]

Would you care to highlight the part of my post where I said it was "useless"? Talk about misinterpreting, you are outright putting words into my mouth that I didnt say.

This whole argument is becoming pointless, however. I am not posting any further on this. If that means you think you "won", fine.

Would you care to highlight where I claimed you said it was useless?

You've implied it several times. You've never said the word. I got the nuance exactly right in my post.

The whole argument was pointless the minute you opened your mouth. Its a free feature, it has multiple applications, and it works fairly well in its first release.

Good on Valve. /thread

 

[frozentundra123456]

Would you care to highlight where I claimed you said it was useless?

You've implied it several times. You've never said the word. I got the nuance exactly right in my post.

The whole argument was pointless the minute you opened your mouth. Its a free feature, it has multiple applications, and it works fairly well in its first release.

Good on Valve. /thread

Post 86. Whatever nuance you put on my post is on you, not me. As I said you attributed things to me that I never said.

 

[Topweasel]

Post 86. Whatever nuance you put on my post is on you, not me. As I said you attributed things to me that I never said.

No you chimed in on a couple of things and got all twisted up on the idea that if you didn't love and use it you weren't embracing it. Which isn't what most people were saying (including myself) in embracing it. Cool tech or hopefully people can find use for this, or hey I could see some points where people could use this is fine. But you even implied (yes implied) it was useless because it locks up usage of two machines, even though people have already given examples of how that isn't a disadvantage.

It won't work well for you we get that. But turning your nose at it because it doesn't work for you is being very shortsighted.

 

[TerryMathews]

No you chimed in on a couple of things and got all twisted up on the idea that if you didn't love and use it you weren't embracing it. Which isn't what most people were saying (including myself) in embracing it. Cool tech or hopefully people can find use for this, or hey I could see some points where people could use this is fine. But you even implied (yes implied) it was useless because it locks up usage of two machines, even though people have already given examples of how that isn't a disadvantage.

It won't work well for you we get that. But turning your nose at it because it doesn't work for you is being very shortsighted.

You said it very well. :beer:

@frozen: so much for a last post, eh?

In general I hate the posters that do this stuff. They very clearly spell something out yet never come right out and say it - you call them out on it and its all "Hey, I never literally said that. How dare you read my post for any sort of implied meaning."

Grow up. Say what you mean and own up to it.

 

[KentState]

Have they fixed the Windows lock screen limitation yet? I tried this yesterday, but had to manually unlock my desktop to get it to work.

 

[Tweak155]

Tried this out since I finally connected all my PC's via ethernet cable at my new house.

I initially tried this streaming on my 100mbps network adapter on my dual core HTPC. The performance was pretty choppy on "Beautiful" so I scaled it back to "Balanced". Still choppy, but less as much.

So rather than turn down game settings, I scrounged around and found my 1gbps network adapter and installed it into my HTPC. Had some problems getting Steam to recognize I had a dedicated PC for some reason... I updated the client to the beta and it seemed to fix the problem. Boot Skyrim back up now that I have a 1gbps link to see if the speed would help with the choppy stuff.

No difference. Looking at network utilization it doesn't go past ~9% which indicates to me it maxes out at about 80mbps. Not sure if this is just the max throughput it needs or if it is some how regulating itself. I checked off the "Prioritize network traffic" and the utiliization did not change.

I still have to play around more to get it to try and run smooth, but I was hoping to avoid turning down the graphics settings.

Anyway, thought that bit of info might be useful to someone...

 

[Tweak155]

One more update...

Changed the setting to "Fast" and it's not too bad at all... thought I would see obvious quality decrease but maybe I'm just not that picky.

Also to the guy bickering... this is quite perfect for me. I have an old PC I turned into a streaming machine and installed a TV tuner. Don't even have a slot for a dedicated graphics card due to the TV tuner taking up the only PCIe slot. But now with this, I can stream from my gaming desktop located on another floor straight to my 120" projector without having to run any additional cables. I consider that pretty useful.

Projector machine: E7300, 4gb mem, integrated video via VGA cable

Gaming: I5 3570k, 16gb mem, 500gb SSD, MSI 670gtx

Both are on Win7, although the gaming machine is on Pro and proj machine is on home. Both 64 bit.

And the streaming does its job pretty decent this early on!

 

[Crow550]

I tried it with my living room PC the other day. Worked pretty good. Depending on the game.

Through gigabit network. I played some Saints Row 4. I myself didn't pick up on any noticeable delay. I only played for a few minutes to test it out. Tomb Raider played well too.

Other games like Max Payne 3 had bad jitter when panning the camera. Couldn't get Skyrim to load as I load it through SKSE.

Look forward to seeing improvements.

 

[Aikouka]

Amusingly enough, the first time I ever tried Steam's streaming was the best it ever worked. Since then, all I've seen are crashes and no audio... with the same game (Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed)! D: Also, it never seems capable of declaring me to be first player in SART. I wonder if that's because my desktop has a controller hooked up or something?

Projector machine: E7300, 4gb mem, integrated video via VGA cable

Your problems are probably related to this PC. I had to look up the E7300, but once I saw that it's an old C2D, I knew it didn't have an IGP. So, what exactly is your GPU? If I had to guess, it's incapable of decoding h.264, which means your CPU has to do it.

 

[Tweak155]

Amusingly enough, the first time I ever tried Steam's streaming was the best it ever worked. Since then, all I've seen are crashes and no audio... with the same game (Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed)! D: Also, it never seems capable of declaring me to be first player in SART. I wonder if that's because my desktop has a controller hooked up or something?



Your problems are probably related to this PC. I had to look up the E7300, but once I saw that it's an old C2D, I knew it didn't have an IGP. So, what exactly is your GPU? If I had to guess, it's incapable of decoding h.264, which means your CPU has to do it.

It is an onboard intel one. Either way, I have another PC I can test with.

I don't have any problems streaming HD or playing HD recordings on it, though.

 

[Tweak155]

It is an onboard intel one. Either way, I have another PC I can test with.

I don't have any problems streaming HD or playing HD recordings on it, though.

So I tried it on my Alienware laptop and it definitely played better.

On "Fast" it is good enough on the dual core though!

 

[ponyo]

I finally got around to testing this. I tested it on HP Chromebook 14 running Elementary OS using Crouton. All I can say is wow. This is a game changer. Performance was little laggy since I'm running wireless on both the gaming PC and the Chromebook but I see the huge potential. Having all the Windows games available under Linux is pretty sweet. Now I'm tempted to try this on Asus Chromebox connected to wired gigabit ethernet. I might buy another Asus Chromebox to test on since I don't want to mess with my current dual boot ChromeOS/OpenELEC Chromebox in the living room.

$179 Chromebox which can run ChromeOS, Linux, XBMC for media, and Steam streaming PC games to your TV? This is the future.