Sure, the introduction of Steam in-home streaming is meant to pave the way for living room-ready Steam Machines and make Steam for Linux’s paltry ( but growing) library less painful, but it’s great being able to game on your laptop while you’re lounging on the couch or lying in bed. Steam in-home streaming, along with Valve’s own Steam Controller and Steam Machine prototype (pictured), are laying the groundwork for Linux-powered living room “PC consoles,” but in-home streaming’s benefits extend to a wide range of hardware.Īll that said, it’s held up remarkably well for me thus far. ![]() Again, Hayden Dingman’s hands-on with Steam in-home streaming can give you a good overview of what to expect. Some games might not play audio, or they might refuse to launch whatsoever. While Steam’s in-home streaming has officially dumped its beta tag, don’t be surprised if you run into occasional frame rate or input woes, as the technology is still in its early days. There’s a reason Valve recommends using wired connections-they’re stronger than wireless ones. If that doesn’t work, it’s time to break out the Ethernet cables. ![]() You can also try enabling the Prioritize network traffic option on your host machine, or switching your router to the less-trafficked 5GHz spectrum band (if your router supports the 5GHz band). What, that didn’t fix the problem either? First, make sure the Enable hardware encoding and Enable hardware decoding options are, in fact, enabled on your host and client machine, respectively-they should be by default. (The frame rate can still get a little hairy in particularly explosive and fast-paced scenes, though.) My Wi-Fi doesn’t have to struggle for airspace with competing networks in my rural abode, however. With my setup-a hardwired Core i5 desktop PC streaming to various laptops over 802.11n-dropping the resolution to 720p helps even action-packed games stream with few hitches. If that doesn’t do enough, click Advanced Client Options, then open the Limit Resolution To drop-down menu and select a less pixel-packed streaming resolution option. Under the “Client options” portion, you’ll see options for Fast, Balanced, and Beautiful, with Balanced enabled by default. If your games are doing the jitter-bug-in-home streaming handles latency by dropping the frame rate, rather than dropping the picture quality, for some bizarre reason-open Steam on your client PC and head to Steam > Settings > In-Home Streaming in the menu bar. For best results, everything should use a hardwired connection, but that’s not always feasible. Games run full-screen on both devices during streaming.īeyond the PCs themselves, the quality of your in-home network makes a big difference to Steam in-home streaming. Using Steam’s in-home streaming feature to stream Assassin’s Creed IV from a desktop with a Radeon 7850 graphics card (the black display) to an 8-year-old MacBook. The vast majority of PCs released in recent years can handle streaming, no problem-our hands-on with the Steam in-home streaming beta was partially conducted on a 2006-era MacBook, for instance. ![]() The requirements for client PCs are much less strict: The only thing you need is a PC with support for hardware-accelerated H264 decoding. The host machine has to run Windows 8, 7, or Vista, as well. You’re probably going to want a discrete graphics card in your host rig, too, since the point of this exercise is to provide a better gaming experience than integrated graphics alone can provide. (Obviously.)Īt a minimum, Valve says you’ll need a quad-core processor in the host machine, the faster the better-between encoding the video and, you know, actually playing the game, streaming hits your processor hard. If your gaming PC has a low-end graphics card, it’ll only be able to send low-end visuals to your client laptop. (Click to enlarge all images in this article.)Īs with all PC gaming experiences, the graphical firepower of your host rig directly impacts the end results. A high-level diagram explaining how Steam in-home streaming works.
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