I encountered these issues again and again streaming to the Steam Link in a variety of games. An afternoon of testing games on the Steam Link usually means trudging upstairs to my PC half a dozen times to close a pop-up that pulled me out of the game I was trying to stream, restarting Steam after it mysteriously crashed, or closing a game that suddenly refuses to take controller inputs. Most frustrating, those crashes and streaming issues often require problem-solving on the host PC. But those times are rare, and actually playing a game means wading through crashes, controller frustrations, and streaming compatibility issues. Those are the positives: when streaming works, it works well. Steam warns that this setting increases latency, but I didn’t feel any more latency while playing, nor did I notice a significant increase in the real-time monitoring tool built into In-Home Streaming. Turning the bitrate from ‘automatic’ to ‘unlimited’ fixed this problem, ramping bandwidth usage up well past 30 megabits per second in exchange for a much clearer image. When I tested with tower defense game Tower Wars, the number of projectiles and fast-moving units on the screen turned my entire image into a blocky, ugly mess of video encoding artifacts–there was just too much data for the bitrate to handle. In busier games, the image quality suffers badly. The default ‘automatic’ bitrate will retain a mostly clear picture in slower-paced games with simpler levels of graphical detail. Latency over a wired connection is basically nonexistent, usually hovering around 0.1 milliseconds.
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