Gadgetory

hello good people Eber here with Hardware Canucks and a little change of locations I'm here at Mike's place hey Mike hey how's it going well so today we're gonna be taking a look at AMD's game streaming service and for those of you who don't really know that it was rolled out as a feature in the Adrenaline 2019 update which was rolled out last year so I actually did an entire video covering that software so if you're interested in learning more link will be right over there I'm excited about this I have to because we've been working on this actually and behind the scenes since around Christmas so that's about four and a bit months now yeah we originally started we had a bunch of issues with it we let aim the iron out the kinks yeah and we decided to go a little bit of a longer term video on this especially since you guys asked us for it in that video that Eber did yeah so uh let's check it out right after a message from our sponsor which is not AMD exactly excuse me please explain is easy to systems fully powered by a single power supply just like me and you two bodies powered by a single mind just imagine the good we can do they revolt X by Phanteks a high-performance unit for multi CPU GPU and dual system configurations with 80-plus platinum efficiency with entirely silent fan mode and twelve year warranty and clean cable management explore the opportunities with the revolt XPS you buy fantex links below all right so let's actually talk about what AMD gamestream is it's essentially a service provided by AMD that lets you stream your PC games from your PC to any device so it just requires a GC and base GPU so anywhere after an R9 to ATX and onwards and then you'll be good to go so the GPU will process the image and then it'll send that to a wireless network to any device and what they mean over any device is any iOS or Android device that's not an Apple TV or a Android TV yeah so basically what is it's a little bit more inclusive than steam link which requires steam to actually process any of the games or in videos game stream or GeForce now which needs NVIDIA GPUs or devices end-to-end so AMD says this is really straightforward what we want to do actually is we want to use the shield tablet which is but what we want to do is we want to use the shield tablet from Nvidia it's a little bit of an older device but at the same time this should show if you can repurpose slightly older Android devices for the service okay so Mike I know that you using game stream for the last four months why don't we actually go through the setup process yeah actually the first thing that I needed to change and set up for myself was a new TV I was actually using one of Panasonic's legendary plasma TVs the problem with that is it's really high latency so I ended up changing out to a Hisense h9 series and I got that because it was a less expensive 65 inch TV it's a 4k UHD HDR support through Dolby vision it's super slim and it has a lot faster response times than my older plasma I did keep that over older plasma because a its legendary and the picture quality is absolutely ridiculous but this high sense TV really came in at a good time for us alright so drive our installation and this is something you really have to pay close attention to so make sure that they're running the updated drivers but also be aware that if you plan on updating it later on you'll have to go through the whole process of setting up AMD link once again so the first thing that you want to do is turn on we live in game settings and then head over to the streaming tab and enable remote play now without this AMD link will still work with monitoring GPU stats to Whatman on your phone but game streaming won't work the next thing you want to do is install the AMD link app on your Android or iOS device and then enable AMD link server on the home page of Radeon settings now with an AMD link there's a lot of different sections including monitoring and setting up screen captures things like that but what we really wanted to focus on was of course the AMD game streaming now as we went through the setup process we realized that there's a QR code that you can scan on your Android device or your iOS device but no matter what we tried we couldn't get it to scan so from there you would have to go to the your manual setup mode which is a timed mode you have to find your IP address and everything and once we did that we ended up getting it to work without a problem taking a peek at the interface it's pretty straightforward so there's quick access to the desktop by pressing the windows + D option the ability to view stream metrics set your desired resolution frame rates and the option to choose the quality of the video and audio bit rates we did notice that the higher the bitrate the smoother the gameplay experience provided you have the proper wireless bandwidth there's also the ability to switch between hardware and software controller options although to be honest we preferred using an actual physical controller than tapping on the display so all of that being said there's a couple things that we wanted to get out there on the table right away that you're gonna have to really be aware of when you're going through the AMD game stream service so the first thing that you have to do is always make sure that any sign-in services like epic game store you play Steam you're already signed in and they're opened up in the background because if you try to actually open a game within AMD link and the game streaming service and you're not signed in it will not work or it'll crash the other thing that you want to make sure of is that all of your games are in your firewall exceptions now that should all have already been done but we need to re-enable that in a couple of situations or you could turn off your firewall but we really don't recommend that also do keep in mind that the aspect ratio off your device will be used rather than your TV or a PC so in this case with our shield TV the TV was like only able to take the aspect ratio from the tablet and not the actual PC so another thing that I wanted to talk about is the latency factor now there's a couple things that we did to minimize the impact of the wireless network and the TV first of all I turned on game mode on the TV to basically get rid of as much processing as possible and the router that I'm using is the rog GT 5300 which is quite the high-end router now we also have to take into account that there's going to be some latency between the wireless controller and the tablet as well as through the HDMI connection obviously as Mike mentioned the latency was just quite high even though that we were just within 25 feet from a powerful router and it was not really suitable for competitive gaming as you can see by this footage as soon as I pulled the trigger on this gunshot it takes quite some time for it to actually show up on the display so latency actually increases with frame skipping so I would actually recommend to avoid that setting but regardless of what we did the one you know really frustrating thing that we had to deal with the AMD link was of course latency with that being said there's still some good things after trying out AMD link yeah so I found that shadow of war it looked really really good it's played smoothly there was of course that delay between the input and when that input is registered on screen but it was less noticeable than in of course competitive games first person shooters things like that assassin's creed Odyssey was also a highlight it worked really well straight up the second we tried to enable it it booted no problems and we were into the game that shows that a lot of these third person games that are ported from the consoles to the PC are going to typically work really really well here but personally what I was really looking forward to is the slower paced games and how those would react because I really wanted to play my favorite strategy games like Warhammer 2 battlefield gothic 2 Civ on my big-screen TV it would have looked amazing the problem is that there seems to be some inherent issues with keyboard and mouse support between aim d-link or AMD game streaming and the Android ecosystem we actually saw in Warhammer 2 mice show up on the screen and neither of them worked properly so that was really frustrating it was yeah and was kind of hilarious too yeah there were some other real issues as well that we encountered so with hell-blade we noticed that the colors were completely in burst so we started seeing blue faces as in blue characters which was really really odd Far Cry 5 crashed reportedly in fact we've had a couple of instances where I would completely restart the system and it just didn't really work at some point and of course the other thing is that we experienced green screen issues when launching battlefield 5 and battlefield 1 I think it's more of an origin thing rather than anything else but but then again yeah yeah you play games like Rainbow six siege didn't start I didn't start Metro Exodus on the epic game store even though we were signed in and everything it looked like it was gonna start it didn't happen so so ultimately what we're trying to say is support is very limited and if you're planning on you know trying to set up for yourself you got to make sure that it actually works and the good thing is it's it's not a subscription service so you can always experiment with these things but like I said from our experience it it was really not that great yeah I think one of the things that we have to applaud AMD for is putting this into their drivers yeah but just having that checkbox there and not having I don't know if it's if it's the financial support that the team needs to make sure that they make this more of a holistic approach or something along those lines it's it just seems like they try to check off a box yes we support game streaming but it's really not there yet the latency I have to give it to Nvidia and steam because both of their services the latency is absolutely nothing compared to what we've seen now with indie game streaming if you guys want to see a comparison between all three of those services side to side latency wise we can do that but it'll be a landslide win for anything but AMD at this point exactly so I think we're happy that the streaming is there but it's not to the point of maturity right now but we're hoping that it gets there in the near future so that's pretty much it thank you so much for watching make sure to check out some relevant content over here subscribe to our boot sequence channel I'm Eber I'm Mike and we'll see you in the next one