🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi guys as an owner of an NVidia shield and soon also of a Steam Link 
box, I want to open this tread to discuss all things gamestreaming.
This might become a huge topic for the years to come, since it moves
pc gaming into the living room.

First of all I have been using Steam Inhome streaming in the past over 
wifi and full lan connections with an xbox controller hooked up to my 
notebook (which itself was hooked to my tv). Wifi it worked more or less 
but you could forget about action games due to occasional wifi hickups. 
RPGs and slower paced games worked fine.

The problem still was the input method which basically came down to 
either buy a wireless mouse and keyboard and use that from the couch or 
play with a controller. In the end I settled for a controller which 
however locked me out of certain genres.
(I am not a fps fan, so I could care less about mouselook and 0ms input lag)

Now I have moved over to a NVidia Shield. Plus side 4k gaming and 5.1 
sound in the living room finally works with the latest beta drivers. The 
input lag also is neglectable on a wired connection, however the game 
selection is limited due to the enforced controller only games 
selection. Out of my 120-130 steam games NVidia has recognized about 19 
being playable on the shield without limitations, mostly aaa titles.
However in the Shields case a wired connection really was/is a must. 
What really suprisingly worked well was their Gamestream service (which 
I tried during the beta phase) even with 20-40ms lag the games were 
really playable. And NVidia definitely had servers all over europe given 
the low ping times I got here in central Europe (20-30ms to NVidias servers)
But either way I dont like to pay a monthly fee for their service for 
80% of games I own anyway and 20% which are mildly interesting. You 
cannot even save your games to the steam cloud if you play that way.


So the next step will be the Steam Link and Steam controller on November 
the 10th. I have high hopes on this one, because in my general opinion 
Steam Inhome Streaming works a tad better than NVidias solution and does 
not rely entirely on the graphics hardware for the encoding. However the 
downside is, no 4k gaming 2.0 sound. The plus side will be that the 
Steam controller will open other genres to couch gaming. Given the 
reports of various people it is a good controller, however certain 
genres lend better to the controller than others. FPS (for fans of that 
stuff) for instance are somewhere between a controller and a mouse 
keyboard combo, if you configure it correctly. The key here will be the 
configuration since the controller is not really a standard controller 
(it can emulate an xinput controller) but you can remap the hell out of it.

So I will look forward to November the 10th when I get my Steam link gear.


Werner