I have been using this on and off in beta. If possible I highly recommend a wired network connection. I have been testing it on a WRT54GL and that was not always sufficient. When my AC router is not misbehaving (ASUS RT-AC66U) I've been able to play online FPS shooters surprisingly well. Fighting games or FPS that are heavily twitch based won't work, but pretty much anything that can suffer the occasional frame drop or isn't precision works well.
tl;dr You may need an N wifi router or better that is rock solid to make things run smooth.
You ARE using a 9 year old router, considering that probably all other hardware (PC, Laptop, Consoles, Phones, Tablets, ...) was replaced since then and most cable connections can't be maxed out with that wifi speed (After forward error correction you'll end up with about 30 mbit/s), a lot of things might be happier if you switched that one out :)
Which modern router do you propose? I am currently running Tomato, it's a great balance of ease-of-use and customizability. I'm not interested in having to do everything on the command line on the router as well, so if a modern router can run some great version of Tomato, it would be fantastic.
I would personally always try to get another AVM FRITZBox product [0]
I've used it for years and their continuous firmware development coupled with the DECT+VOIP abilities and solid hardware makes them a joy to use. Sadly, this is almost exclusively marketed towards the German market, hence my previous exposure.
Now that I live in the US, I'd assume that I'll probably have to take a look at ebay sellers or buy one on my next visit.
I used to run OpenWRT beforehand, but even after lots of configuring, I basically just ended up at a place that this system gives me out of the box. If I really wanted to, I could enable telnet and install the cyanogenmod-like "Freetz" OS on the machine [1]
"Members of the OpenWrt team have been in contact with Linksys for a while, discussing collaboration on device support in OpenWrt.
There had been no technical collaboration on device support until Belkin engineers posted a few incomplete patches in early April. These patches are currently being cleaned up, as they do not meet our quality standards.
The most important part that is still missing is a usable driver for the Marvell 802.11ac wireless chipset. Belkin is working on fixing this, but they have not given us an estimation on when such a driver will be provided.
The default firmware for this device seems to be using a proprietary driver provided by Marvell, which uses non-standard APIs for configuration. We don't know if Marvell will open source this driver, or will work on an alternative Linux driver. We believe that both approaches require a considerable amount of effort and time."
I've had extraordinarily good luck with the apple AirPort Extreme. Handles wifi n traffic and is rock solid. I can regularly play twitch games over it or stream 1080 p without issue.
I went from dd-wrt on a WRT54G to a TP-LINK TL-WR841NR with OpenWRT and it feels almost exactly the same. I even setup my network with the exact same SSID and password and my devices acted like nothing changed.
I'm actually running two access points right now. One of things I've valued the WRT54G on has been it's stability, where my AC router tends to crap all over itself depending on how demanding the active video streams are. Additionally, I barely get 15mbit down from Comcast currently.
My RT-N66U handles 720p just as well as my powerline network does, at least with a good signal, and that's on 2.4GHz with 2-3 interfering channels.
If you can't get WiFi to perform, don't be surprised, but it isn't impossible.
Just remember to turn off your bluetooth stuff, my connection was terrible at first and I'm pretty sure shutting down my active bluetooth connections are what fixed it. (Alas, if only my client was 5GHz)
P.S. My rendering machine is always wired through powerline, so my setup does have an advantage in that the rendering machine isn't competing for wireless bandwidth with the client!
I've been using this more and more lately. Most recently to play Dark Souls 2 on a laptop in the living room rather than having to be sequestered upstairs in the office.
It's pretty amazing how well it runs, with the input lag being minimal and the quality of visuals far surpassing what the laptop could actually handle on it's own.
Being a pretty hardcore Dark Souls guy I have to ask - is even that minimal lag acceptable?
I'm just thinking how many invader duels end up being super close, even a fraction of a second here and there adds up. Plus there is already some lag when playing online with friends and/or against an invader to begin with.
It's really working great, I've been using it for about the past six months (beta) and it always went great, way better than expected. I wasted hours and days trying to come with a similar solution and it always sucked. Glad they came up with something actually enjoyable.
Tried it a couple of months ago, and it ran like ass. Could be due to older hardware? Serving PC is core 2 duo 6850, and htpc it was playing on is core 2 duo 6400. Wired fast ethernet connection.
You want the serving pc to have hardware accelerated video encoding (e.g. Intel Quick Sync), otherwise it runs terribly. Similarly, the client should have hardware accelerated decode, but that is very common.
To anyone running headless systems, it's worth mentioning that this works extremely well for remote control of network systems. I've played with it a bit so far and I'm quite impressed with the low latency/high quality.
So I can add Visual Studio to my steam library, and potentially develop in it from my mac? This is huge, I can now run my PC at home headless since I only used it for games/visual studio.
I would be interested in the other way around, as well.
Could I add XCode to Steam on a Mac and then stream that on my main Desktop?
I know I can hook up my MacBook to an external keyboard and monitors but I have a very... integrated setup for my main Windows Desktop and hooking up my MacBook with those monitors, keyboard would be quite a hassle.
This way, I could keep it on my couch table and still be able to work on XCode on my big Desktop monitor.
I guess so, I've been using it to run Chrome just for the lolz and it works really well. Just add an app to your Steam library, then run it and good chances are that it'll actually start. Sometimes it doesn't but in most cases it works well!
I used to have a Firefox shortcut in my Steam games list so I could watch online video with the Steam overlay. It wasn't flawless, but it worked great most of the time, as long as I didn't try to open the overlay until I was in full screen.
So if I want to stream Steam games to my TV, what sort of client hardware do I need on the TV end? Is there an inexpensive box I can buy and use for this purpose? The support articles are kind of vague on what the system requirements for clients are...
I just got up and running with a temporary HTPC that is attached to my second TV. Its a crappy Nettop with an Atom and 1x PCI-e ION2.
I'm getting 30FPS @ 720p on the TV streaming a number of games (Civ V, Stick of Truth); I also tried a number of non-Steam games which worked great as well.
It seems like basically the machine needs to be able to push the equivalent video resolution (presumably software codec; In-Home Streaming probably doesn't leverage hardware MPEG decoders) and that's about it.
On my TV I use a 65W A10 in a mini ITX case with a 90W PSU. It has on-chip graphics, HD7660, and it handles streaming at 1080p without getting warm (my network on the other hand...)
I've also used my laptop, an A6 with HD8250 on-chip graphics. It does 720p with no problem (don't know about 1080p, 720p is the native res)
I expect you can go even lower, but if you are building an HTPC the cost difference between an A6 and an A4 is pretty small.
Edit2: Apparently it does use hardware encode/decode. I think the most recent 2-3 generations of chips from both vendors all have that, but don't quote me.
Many of the lower-end Steam Machines should be capable of doing this, as well as some HTPC implementations (assuming they can run Steam, so not a Roku or AppleTV or such). I'm betting the SteamOS system requirements[1] would be a decent proxy until more information is released, although I doubt that you would require a hard drive that big and a graphics card that powerful.
"With good hardware and a fast home network, you’ll forget the game is running remotely."
But with bad or moderate hardware you'll experience wonderful 5000 ms latency and have a horrible time.
It seems like you would need an HTPC anyway to load up steam and send the video from that 2nd computer to your TV. The whole process seems pointlessly convoluted.
I'd rather have wireless hdmi or even a really long hdmi cable from my good computer to wherever the tv is.
The upsides to a remote rendering rig are not obscene, but they are nice. Basically a top-end machine is big, ugly, noisy, and hot. So remote rendering lets you put it out of sight in a dark corner of a cool room in your house. In my case, the basement laundry.
It also means the rendering rig can still have normal monitors to be used as a normal computer if you choose.
Lastly, even my $400 laptop can now play Skyrim at max settings, so I can play on the porch if I like.
As your other reply mentions, as far as competing remote rendering protocols, there aren't really any others good for games.
I tried to do this with VNC a long time ago, so I could play Wizardry 8 on a laptop in the backyard. My wifi couldn't reach to the shady spot of the yard.
Whoa, I will have to try this with Raspberry Pi - "How to make 35$ SteamBox".
Btw, just tested it on my MacBook Pro, its awesome to start some CPU/GPU intensive game and play it without fan noise and heat :) Also interesting thing - you can add nonsteam games (battlefield, guild wars, heck even applications - WinSCP etc) and stream them ! This is awesome !
I've seen some of the discussion related to SteamOS and the Raspberry Pi. Looks like SteamOS has no ARM support, so that is likely to be a hurdle. Something similar is Limelight which streams your computer to a PI including keyboard and mouse support, but is only compatible with a Nvidia 600 or 700 card.
True, but on order to be really useful, an ARM option would be needed. Just think, a 30 dollar RaspberryPi with a bluetooth dongle popped in the back of your TV and you will be able to play any of your Windows games.
tl;dr You may need an N wifi router or better that is rock solid to make things run smooth.