Main Area and Open Discussion > Non-Windows Software

Steam: now has working beta of in-home streaming capability for games and apps

<< < (3/3)

Deozaan:
In-Home Streaming is now out of beta and available for everyone.-Deozaan (May 23, 2014, 05:45 PM)
--- End quote ---

For what it's worth, we (my oldest daughter and I) tested this yesterday using my desktop PC (nice gaming rig) and her laptop (not much a gaming laptop, i.e., HD3000 graphics chip).  I used FarCry3 as the test game and the whole experience actually worked out pretty well.  For a game like that on her laptop, typically, we have to really reduce the graphic settings in order to make the framerate playable.  However, using the streaming functionality, we were able to play FC3 on her laptop with MUCH better graphical quality than if we played directly on her laptop.  There was some screen tearing on the laptop side that reminded me of the effect you get when you play with a framerate higher than the refresh rate of your monitor.  However, we could have probably reduced that by using a lower resolution to play at as I think her laptop was struggling to keep up with the video decoding that drives this functionality.  At any rate, it was pretty damn slick overall.   :up: to Steam.   :D
-skwire (June 06, 2014, 10:05 AM)
--- End quote ---

I've also test this out somewhat. There are games that don't even run or run so poorly as to be nigh unplayable on my netbook that I have been able to stream without much issue.

But some games didn't work out so well. When there was a free Borderlands 2 weekend a few months ago, I tested it on my netbook. The main title screen looked really nice, and there's no way in Michigan that it would even run directly on my netbook! But while playing there was too much lag between my netbook and my gaming rig. It was hard to aim the correct way and with the speed required of an FPS game.

I imagine I would have had better results if I could have plugged straight into the LAN instead of using WiFi. But if my PC and my netbook are close enough to the router to be plugged in, then they're both close enough that I'd just use my PC to play games.

But for now I'm glad that I don't have to worry about downloading most games to my netbook (saving HDD space) and that I can play games on it that previously wouldn't even run.

Making sure I understand this... you cannot access anything from the shared library from multiple computers at the same time?-wraith808 (June 06, 2014, 11:24 AM)
--- End quote ---

Correct.  I started Game-A on Computer-1 and attempted to start Game-B on Computer-2.  A warning box appeared stating that Computer-1 already had a game going and would be disconnected if I were to continue attempting to play on Computer-2.-skwire (June 06, 2014, 11:32 AM)
--- End quote ---

Hopefully they'll allow that in the future. But in the meantime, there's still offline mode for that. (Which is how you'd accomplish it on Steam before.)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page