Gadgetory

for ser raptor k 40 keyboard and m45 mouse are designed to provide best-in-class features and performance for gaming click now to learn more valve in-home streaming uses the power and compatibility of a windows-based gaming pc somewhere in the house to enable a great gaming experience on other devices and operating systems basically anything that can run the Steam client Windows OS 10 or Linux can use it as long as the hardware is powerful enough it works on inexpensive desktop PCs notebook PCs or even tablets so what does it do first of all it's in beta so all of this is subject to change but the basic set at this point so here you go in-home streaming uses your gaming machine with a powerful graphics card for example your office or your mancave rig to act as the server and to run a demanding game then with as little latency as possible convert that to an h.264 compressed video stream it then sends that video stream over your home network to another machine for example your home theater PC that's hooked up to your TV which acts as a client that can without working very hard decode that video stream and display it on the screen at the same time the client PC takes input commands from your game controller or keyboard and mouse and again latency is key here sends them back to the server to actually control the game the idea is that any PC with adequate network performance and CPU horsepower can let you play your games the games on your gaming rig remotely so what does it not do it does not allow streaming over the Internet although I suspect workarounds for that won't be much of a stretch for the technically inclined it does not allow multiple people to use the server or streaming machine at the same time so your office gaming PC can have someone sitting at it working on spreadsheets while you're using the horsepower of that GPU to game downstairs that will actually be running the game on screen at the same time just like in videos game stream technology number three it does not allow logging in from multiple locations on the same work to the same account and playing different games at the same time we'll need Steam family sharing for that which is hopefully coming soon number four it does not allow higher resolutions than the connected monitor of the server PC the game must run on both PCs at the same time so if your desktop computer has a 720p monitor and your TV downstairs is 1080p then your stream will be limited to 720p the good news is that the opposite is not true so as long as your gaming PC has the same or higher resolution as the other PC your remote PC can scale that image down appropriately number five is it's a little bit finicky right now and it does not have perfect game compatibility in the future I'd expect this to be much improved and you should be able to stream most of the games in your Steam library even the ones that you've added manually number six it does not deliver the greatest image quality it's seemingly capped at about thirty megabit per second maximum streaming bitrate so that means color depth will be lower which is perceived as blockiness and what would otherwise be smooth color transitions and it also introduces artifacts some that are difficult to notice and some that are very very easy to notice such as these around a crosshair in Battlefield Bad Company 2 moving on to hardware requirements valve has been pretty tight-lipped about these probably because this functionality just went into beta and they are still working on it but there are a few things that we know CPU performance will have to be enough to decode and playback in h.264 video stream at whatever frame rate and resolution you're running officially valve supports 720p and 1080p at either 30 or 60 fps network performance also matters but how many megabits or gigabits per second it can achieve is not actually the most important thing connection latency and reliability are much more critical than throughput a theoretically faster n or even AC wireless connection will inherently drop more frames than a normal Ethernet or even a slow powerline network connection because hardline networking performance is much less susceptible to interference speaking of interference forget about 2.4 gigahertz and wireless even if the fruit put is fast enough there's so much interference on that frequency that 720 30s isn't a great experience 5 gigahertz Wireless n was much better than I testing but that's a subject for another video stay tuned for a follow-up where we take a closer look at network requirements the other requirement is the PC actually doing the gaming has to be powerful enough to run those games that's kind of a given all of this aside so we don't really know exactly what we need if you are trying in-home streaming and you're wondering how your configuration is doing pressing f6 on the client PC provides a somewhat useful little analysis bar that drop pops up and tells you latency dropped frames and stuff like that I didn't always find that the numbers correlated directly to the gaming experience I was having though so your mileage may vary but at least it's in there so let's move on to the practical demonstrations obviously if you have two powerful gaming rigs you could stream between them but gaming locally would usually make more sense in this case so I'm going to focus on some demos for you guys that show how I think this technology will be used here's demo number one I'm using a Linux in this case steam OS machine to run a game that doesn't natively run on Linux boom your entire Windows game library now runs on a modestly powerful Linux box no excuse not to try it now hey in this case this is batman arkham origins running at 1080p 60fps and here's demo number two this old low-cost low-power sapphire machine has an AMD e450 dual-core apu with integrated graphics in spite of its age and lackluster performance I can have a console grade gaming experience that is to say 720p 30fps with no frame loss while playing the latest games in this case I've got Battlefield Bad Company 2 running here but that was just for the sake of you know mixing up our games a little bit here's demo number three this is a thin enlight notebook with integrated intel graphics and I love fitted lights they're portable there's this one there's this one this one can work as a notebook or a tablet it's super lightweight but like many people I had to make the decision between portability and gaming performance not anymore here it is running BioShock Infinite at 1080p 30fps this is wirelessly and the experience isn't perfect but if you have a USB to Ethernet adapter even this one right here a dual-core Ultrabook was able to stream at 1080p 60fps very very impressive now we're getting into experimental territory demo number four is I finna t3 by 1080p it didn't work with lots of games and it was more of an exercise in pushing the limits rather than trying to deliver a great gaming experience but it worked it's not fantastic latency feels noticeably higher and the framerate especially when moving around consistently can't go above about 20 fps which is interesting because we're at three times the resolution of 1080p so being only able to achieve 20 FPS or one third of 60 FPS the maximum allowable value in the valve settings looks like it may be an artificially imposed limitation one that valve could unlock in the future by giving us higher bit rates for higher resolution streaming the grand finale our most elaborate test setup yet we have two 4k TVs one with our Radeon r9 290x gaming machine and the other with my pretty run-of-the-mill I mean it's a GTX 670 so it's pretty decent but this is with my steam machine you can see they're connected NCIX was generous enough to let us come and tear apart two stores to get access to these two 4k tvs run ethernet cables between two tapering stores but we are pretty much ready to find out if this is going to work so we are setting we are limiting our resolution to the desktop resolution which happens to be a 38 20 by 2160 so that's 4k which obviously isn't a setting that we can actually you know set here so we're going to set our bandwidth to unlimited our frame rate to automatic and we're going to find out if this works I've been working on this for about an hour and a half to get this set up so let's fire up portal 2 and see if it flies not defeated yet but we discovered an issue and that is that the Nvidia graphics card in here with the Linux drivers that it has to run because this is a running steam OS does not support a 4k output over HDMI yet so we switched to a Windows machine we tried to use mini DisplayPort to active dual link HD or DVI to HDMI and it showed up as a selection in the resolution options but then the TV spat that out so conveniently we're at NCIX and we have another notebook sitting right here and we are now installing steam we're running at 4k on that one so we're going to find out if this is actually going to work very shortly it's working actually we uh we've shot in the dark we went and fired up Batman and it's working capturing 3840 by 2160 at around 20 oh my goodness it just dipped down to 14 frames per second out something on a little bit concerned about is the link utilization here it's telling me 21 percent of estimated and it's not going above 100 megabit per second so I'm wondering if we might have a slower than gigabit connection for some reason if we might have a bad Ethernet cable or something like that but I'm going to go ahead and confirm these changes and we are definitely running at 4k resolution now the the bitrate is not really enough to sustain it properly you can tell it's quite blocky but in terms of sheer resolution it's running so there you have it guys Batman Arkham origins running in 4k over the network using steam in-home streaming is it a perfect experience absolutely not it's leggy as all balls right now and the the low bitrate so it's about 32 megabit even when we're maxing everything out we're running at 4k makes it look not nearly as good as if you're actually sitting right in front of it but the fact that it works at all just shows such promise for this technology in the future and when you consider as well how functional the 1080p version is and how low latency that is and how we're going to see better network connections and faster processors on either side in the future I think it is just so exciting and there's so much promise for this technology so thanks guys for checking out our steam in-home streaming video don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thanks again to NCIX for letting us come in here and borrow their two 4k TVs to try this out you