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Valve gives Steam Remote Play a long overdue upgrade

Spyxos

Member
Steam Remote Play gets support for "4K high quality streaming presets" to give PC gamers the chance to play together at high resolutions for the first time.

valve-steam-remote-play-4k-1-550x309.jpg


Steam Remote Play is a handy service that lets you stream compatible games from your Steam library to your phone, tablet, or laptop. Its sister feature, Remote Play Together, facilitates streaming to your friends, and even lets them join in your games. Until now, we were limited to fiddling with our settings to allow 4K streaming, and there were often performance issues. But with the latest Steam Client Beta update, Valve has added support for “4K high quality streaming presets”. It’s about time, too.

 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
I hope this doesn't break old clients. I still have a Raspberry Pi connected to one TV running steamlink, and it just barely has the specs to run the existing client code without lag.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Used that shit once and it worked super well... then the lag kicked in. Sitting 1 room away from my pc and yet it was stuttering and glitching up a mess, nothing was consistent.

yeah I'll just get a steam deck
 

JimboJones

Member
Used that shit once and it worked super well... then the lag kicked in. Sitting 1 room away from my pc and yet it was stuttering and glitching up a mess, nothing was consistent.

yeah I'll just get a steam deck
I've never got any of these local streaming solutions to work well.
Is there any tips on how to set up your home network to work efficiently with these technologies 🤔.
It always baffled how I could get better results with services like Stadia.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Doesn’t matter how good your WiFi connection it still won’t be good enough.
I do however use it on wired connection in home to stream to different rooms and it works well.
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
I've never got any of these local streaming solutions to work well.
Is there any tips on how to set up your home network to work efficiently with these technologies 🤔.
It always baffled how I could get better results with services like Stadia.

Works smoothly for me... which of your connections are wired? You certainly don't want the PC and the client machine to both be on wireless. Even just having the PC on ethernet and the client device on wifi but very close to one of your access points gives clean results for me. Obviously ethernet on both sides is best.
 
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Soltype

Member
been using this for BG3 when I'm not home., was suprised at how it felt at 1440p. Never used it with a fast paced game though.
 

SantaC

Member
is it a TV app, because how do you stream this to your tv without an app?
 
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jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
I've never got any of these local streaming solutions to work well.
Is there any tips on how to set up your home network to work efficiently with these technologies 🤔.
It always baffled how I could get better results with services like Stadia.
As others have said above, for best results one of the devices (preferably both) should have a wired connection. Latency (not speed) is your enemy here, so anything you can do to reduce it will yield better results. For wired connections, your latency on a typical home network should be about 1ms. For wireless, it can be upwards of 60ms or more - meaning if both ends are on Wi-Fi you have 120+ms of latency just for the data to get from one device to another. The devices themselves will have their own latency, a few ms here or there for things like wireless controller inputs talking to the device playing the game or a few ms for each device to process and return data. All of this stuff adds up in a hurry.

One suggestion I give people is upgrading your Wi-Fi access points or router to use Wi-Fi 6 (along with your client device supporting it too, of course) to lower your overall latency. You can also do things like use wired controllers if the device you're playing on supports them. However, even under ideal conditions everywhere else, you're probably going to have noticeable lag if both devices are on Wi-Fi.
 
Will need to see some benchmarks to compare with Sunlight/Moonlight
I used a lot of steamlink I even have the original hardware one...

But I have to say SteamLink/RemotePlay is a absolute joke when compared to sunlight + moonlight so much that is hard to say that they are even in the same software category.

Also even if the Remote play now is on par with moonlight/sunlight that would not be enough as moonlight allow you to play any game in your PC even if the game is not inside your steam library.
 
Might give this a go sometime. Already leave the PC on while at work for Plex/PlexAmp (why pay for Spotify etc when I can dump my own discs to stream :messenger_ok:) so with that being wired and the PC I use at work being the same (works well with PS+ streaming) I may as well try streaming some PC games. Do I just install Steam onto my work PC and stream through that?
 

JimboJones

Member
As others have said above, for best results one of the devices (preferably both) should have a wired connection. Latency (not speed) is your enemy here, so anything you can do to reduce it will yield better results. For wired connections, your latency on a typical home network should be about 1ms. For wireless, it can be upwards of 60ms or more - meaning if both ends are on Wi-Fi you have 120+ms of latency just for the data to get from one device to another. The devices themselves will have their own latency, a few ms here or there for things like wireless controller inputs talking to the device playing the game or a few ms for each device to process and return data. All of this stuff adds up in a hurry.

One suggestion I give people is upgrading your Wi-Fi access points or router to use Wi-Fi 6 (along with your client device supporting it too, of course) to lower your overall latency. You can also do things like use wired controllers if the device you're playing on supports them. However, even under ideal conditions everywhere else, you're probably going to have noticeable lag if both devices are on Wi-Fi.
I do use a powerline between my PC and router, I wonder if that could be causing issues.
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
I do use a powerline between my PC and router, I wonder if that could be causing issues.
There are several factors involved there, such as the model of power line adapter you are using but most importantly the quality of the electrical wiring in your house.
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
Also even if the Remote play now is on par with moonlight/sunlight that would not be enough as moonlight allow you to play any game in your PC even if the game is not inside your steam library.

But you can do this with SteamLink as well... I stream plenty of old-school games over it that aren't in my steam library. You are able to access and stream your whole desktop over it just fine.
 

Techies

Member
Now if they woould kindly enable remote play for Baldur's gate 3. I had to download parsec to do splitscreen remotely.

I'm set up for wireless VR, but the same basic rules apply

You need 5ghz (wifi5 or wifi6). wifi6 is stable, wifi5 drops eventually for some reason.

Have a percentage headroom available. You need this headroom available for encoding. Limiting fps to 60fps helps for this. If your running 50fps, you will experience lag.
 

phant0m

Member
I've never got any of these local streaming solutions to work well.
Is there any tips on how to set up your home network to work efficiently with these technologies 🤔.
It always baffled how I could get better results with services like Stadia.
Streaming from my Desktop to Steam Deck actually works super well. I played Hogwarts for hours that way, sitting on the couch with my Deck while my wife played on PS5.

Yea I know the Deck can run HL natively, but running the game on my desktop is higher res, locked 60fps and makes the Deck’s battery last way longer
 

JimboJones

Member
Tried giving it a go again, seems to work fairly well even on steamdeck, I did get a powerline direct to my other PC which helped, it was using a usb wifi adapter before but I was surprised at the steamdeck performance. The only disappointing result was the Sony TV which has the steamlink app on it, I don't think the actual streaming was a problem but the bluetooth connection for the controller to the TV was really laggy and gave the perception or high latency. So for that I dug out my old hardware steamlink and it works much better (limited to 1080p 60 though).
Now the last time I gave it a fair shake I did have an rx480 (now a 3060ti) and an older 6600k cpu (now a 12600k) so possibly that's helped a bit.
 

El Muerto

Member
is it a TV app, because how do you stream this to your tv without an app?
There's an app on Samsung tvs. There's also an android tv app which i dont recommend using. I would always get severe input lag on Android devices using a DS4, Dualsense, and Xbox controller. I bought a USFF pc and installed linux and the steam link app on it. Much better than a raspberry pi.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
That's fine, but remote play on Steam has noticeably been lagging behind Moonlight when it comes to imagine quality and latency, and is something they should improve on. Haven't tested with this latest update though.
 
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