Steam In-home Streaming

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trinibwoy

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Didn't see a thread dedicated to this so figured I would start one.

It seems Valve's streaming service is out of beta and has been available to the public for a few months so decided to give it a try. The results were far better than expected especially on a wireless network.

If I had known it works this well I would have gone for a cheaper option than the 660 for my living room PC. Latency is surprisingly low but the verdict is out on IQ. I thought I saw compression artifacts for a few seconds at one point. Still impressive overall though.

Host PC: Core i5 4670k @ 4Ghz, GTX 680
Client PC: Core i5 4460 @ 3.2Ghz, GTX 660

Network (802.11n 5Ghz) : Host - GigE - Asus AC-66U Router - Asus EA-N66 Bridge - GigE - Client

Distance between bridge and router: 25ft through one wall
Peak network bandwidth measured with iPerf: 300Mbps

Streaming results =>
Batman AC 1080p: 60fps
Input latency: 0.9ms
Display latency: 24ms
Ping: 1.7ms
Bitrate: 26Mbps
Estimated bandwidth: 210Mbps

Has anyone else tried this out?
 
Yup I've used it quite a bit, for me it works great. I use it both via gigabit wired when inside the house, and via wireless ac when I'm playing outside chillin on my hammock. My pc is a Hawell 4770k, two 670 gpu's and a Netgear gigabit wireless AC router.

I have another tv room where I put a usb 3.0 switch that has wired gigabit ethernet, wireless headphones, wireless keyboard/mouse and the wireless 360 controller attach to it. So when I want to play in that room I simply plop my Macbook Pro with Windows 8.1 on the tv stand, plug in power, the hdmi cable and that usb switch. Presto it's now a fully working gaming pc in sheep clothing. I disable the laptop screen which Windows 8.1 lets you do, so only the tv is displaying an image. Then I play. I finished Batman Arkam Origins mostly playing this way and it ran at a perfect 60fps with no hitches at all. The fans on my Macbook Pro never even kicked up, it just sat there silently while I played the game at full spec at 1920x1080 60fps. Totally awesome, works like a charm.

I also like to play games sometimes while sitting outside on my hammock, and it works great there as well. It does have the occasional hiccup that way, I mean what can you do it's wireless, but it was still able to deliver 60fps and overall was still great. I basically would lie on my hammock, plug in a 360 controller, and play. It's kind of funny to be playing such full spec games on a laptop while on a hammock, but it actually works really well.

I can't comment much on input latency. Generally I'm not very sensitive to that sort of thing. The only time in gaming history that I've ever noticed input latency being an issue was when playing Killzone on a ps3 many a moon ago but apart from that it's not something that's ever bugged me much, even on other games which people have claimed had it.
 
i tried it a few times with watch dogs but the steam in-home server always crash after splash screen or only stream a portion of screen (the size of splash screen).

then i never tried it again :/
 
orangpelupa said:
i tried it a few times with watch dogs but the steam in-home server always crash after splash screen or only stream a portion of screen (the size of splash screen).

then i never tried it again :/
Click to expand...

Was that during the beta or after final release? I never did try it when in beta, only when it was officially released did I give it a shot.
 
i think it was final release when watch dogs released. because i dont use steam beta and the stream option is there.

i also do googling at that time and it seems other people have that problem too. they say the streaming system "trapped" in wrong window.

some even recommended binding the streaming to explorer.exe (so it act like remote desktop) <-- this do work as long as the game is in windowed fullscreen borderless. or fish it with notepad.exe.
 
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Is this something that the Xbox One could do?

Tommy McClain
 
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I'm sure they could do it but they never would. They would have to revive heir GFWL or something to e able to have a client on the PC with validated games and it would be a lot of work for something they really don't want consumers to do. MS would rather people buy Xbox games as they would be getting something from that, whereas there is no profit for them whatsoever for streaming Windows games to an Xbox (apart from the initial Xbox purchase).

I've used the in-home streaming a bunch of times on my HTPC and it's always worked great. I was surprised it worked so well even for uPlay games via Steam, as I had figured the separate launch system would mess with it somehow but I was able to play Assassin's Creed in it's full glory just fine. I even played Witcher 2 on my crappy i3 laptop over wireless-n with no problems. It works great!
 
Streaming PC games to the Xbox One would be cool, but I was actually talking about streaming Xbox One games to other TVs maybe using 360s or a Chromecast-like device or streaming to other PCs, tablets or phones. Is the Xbox One hardware technically able to do it? Now that I think about it, the PS4 supports Remote Play & that's basically what Steam In-Home Streaming is right? If so, then the Xbox One shouldn't have any issues either. Sorry for derailing, carry on.



Tommy McClain
 
Making an Android client would be all sorts of win.
I'm also hoping for them to include multi-channel surround sound in the streaming. That way I could have only a single PC for games in the house.
 
So currently Steam streaming is limited to 2 channel audio? Kind of a bummer considering the whole point is streaming to the living room where the surround sound is.

Any wired connection should be able to handle it, but it's be fine with me if they require 1Gbps.
 
homerdog said:
So currently Steam streaming is limited to 2 channel audio? Kind of a bummer considering the whole point is streaming to the living room where the surround sound is.
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Hmm it's the opposite for me, my gaming pc is already in the home theater room, it's been there for 7 or so years now so I have multi channel audio there with all the bells and whistles. I mostly use their home streaming to beam games to other not so full featured tv's or devices that tend to be only two channel or even just headphones for audio.

I do wonder if they will start making steam clients for other devices. The main issue is how to handle joystick input...although Amazon Fire tv does have a joystick option. Not sure how they would handle that on other devices though like Roku's, Smart tv's, etc... I guess they could partner with a tv manufacturer and offer a Steam controller and Steam app included with the tv, could be cool.
 
I would really love for Anandtech or TechReport to start quantifying latency. It's hard to know how good Steam streaming, or Onlive, or Nvidia streaming, or Playstation Now, etc. actually are without quantifying the latency.
 
joker454 said:
I do wonder if they will start making steam clients for other devices.

I guess they could partner with a tv manufacturer and offer a Steam controller and Steam app included with the tv, could be cool.
Click to expand...
You know, that's a really interesting concept. It's a little complex though, TV customers would have to have a PC, a home network, get a steam account, install the client and buy some games first before they can actually use this feature (many steps to go through that would confuse neophytes), but I suppose steam existing users are a big enough market to target as-is, and many of them decently technically competent in order to set this up...

Maybe you should patent your idea. Offer to license it to Gaben...for a small fee. You could do us all a favor and condition the deal on valve actually releasing HL3, that alone would be worth a little bit of patent trolling. ;)
 
I test-streamed from my PC to my Macbook Pro just for fun, and it worked really well. Macbook's on triple stream 5GHz wifi-N, but I noticed nothing peculiar. At first I couldn't understand why I couldn't get streaming to work (all PC-only games were greyed out on the Mac side) before I got streaming enabled in the steam client's settings, which felt rather redundant. Rather preferred it'd just enable it by default, but other than that little quirk it was smooth sailing.
 
yes, nvidia PC can stream to other device (i tested android) for free performance by using the integrated H264 encoder in Nvidia GPU.
 
joker454 said:
I do wonder if they will start making steam clients for other devices. The main issue is how to handle joystick input...although Amazon Fire tv does have a joystick option. Not sure how they would handle that on other devices though like Roku's, Smart tv's, etc... I guess they could partner with a tv manufacturer and offer a Steam controller and Steam app included with the tv, could be cool.
Click to expand...


ps3 can stream to pc but sony removed (have not made it?) it on ps4.
 
Grall said:
You know, that's a really interesting concept. It's a little complex though, TV customers would have to have a PC, a home network, get a steam account, install the client and buy some games first before they can actually use this feature (many steps to go through that would confuse neophytes), but I suppose steam existing users are a big enough market to target as-is, and many of them decently technically competent in order to set this up...

Maybe you should patent your idea. Offer to license it to Gaben...for a small fee. You could do us all a favor and condition the deal on valve actually releasing HL3, that alone would be worth a little bit of patent trolling. ;)
Click to expand...

Hah, I intended to make HL3 a requirement when I made my pitch to Valve :) Realistically I figure they are working on this already with various partners. It doesn't make sense for Google, Apple, MS, etc to do this with Valve as they have their own stores, but I think it does make sense for guys like the TV makers, Directv, Roku, etc who act more like aggregators of other peoples content.
 
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