In-Home Streaming Faceoff: Steam Remote Play vs. Moonlight

[ArjunKL]

Whether you just want to play Skyrim in bed, or take your your work apps with you to the living room, solutions like Steam in-home streaming and remote dek offer a near-flawless experience.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/2198-steam-remote-play-vs-moonlight/

 

[Farkinell]

I've been using Steam Remote Play for the last year, especially when I broke my ankle and couldn't physically sit at my desktop. The experience generally is very good and I'd like to offer the following tips/comments

- You can pair an Xbox or PS controller to an iPad which is fully supported BUT to bring down the input latency and if you're in bluetooth range, pair them to your host PC rather than the client device

-SRP supports Wake-on-LAN so you can boot (and shutdown) the PC remotely from your device

-Attaching an external keyboard and trackpad to an iPad running SRP turns your iPad into a full-on gaming 'laptop' with desktop performance. I'm running Cyberpunk at 1440p with an xbox controller in bed

-The quality of the stream is **heavily** dependant on your router quality and settings. I've had three routers over the last year (all free from ISP) and connection even over wired LAN in the same room as the host varies wildly from almost unplayable (Linksys Velop) to mostly good (Virgin Cable) to excellent (BT HomeHub)

-If anyone has any settings on the router to optimise the in-home connection I'd be all ears, networking is not my bag.

 

[Shadowboxer]

I’ve never managed to get a great experience using steams remote play or steam link. Not enough to actually put any real time into a game. It’s often not the latency or frame rate etc but odd glitches and issues and also quality reduction, it’s like playing a YouTube video of a game. One of which is the control pad, I swear I spend ages fixing issues with a controller everytime I bother using it and then 3 months later everything has been updated and the controller isn’t configured correctly so I have to go online and start all over again. Also if you have two monitors running on your PC you can get issues if you stream, there’s no way of using your pc for something else separately whilst streaming which I think is a shame, I’d like to stream games whilst playing a movie or so but oh well.

I think cloud streaming will be much better, when they get it done properly and enough people have a fast enough connection to access it.

 

[Toju Mikie]

Oh yeah, I've used GeForce Now, and the experience was really good, but I tried it within a few blocks from the server (<1ms). I haven't tried Steam Link or Moonlight, but I might give them a try.
Its helpful to do a ping test to the host computer you are trying to play from, whether it is to a local host or a remote PC. Obviously, connected via Ethernet, the ping should be <1ms, but if I connect to the local host via WiFi in my local network, it goes up to 6ms, which is still not too bad.

Another thing to keep in mind is to get the latency of the monitor or screen that you are trying to play from. Some laptops have 1-3ms, others have a high 50ms depending on the panel.

 

[ScottSoapbox]

I use steam remote play to stream from my office PC to the NUC hidden behind my living room 4K TV with Xbox controllers.

It's actually what pushed me towards 4K / 60fps gaming (GPU upgrade to 3070 because that's all I could get) which is slightly more demanding than my Ultrawide 1440p (freesync 120 but I rarely got that high on my 2070 though it was always 60+).

I wish steam supported more like 4K 90 fps streaming but my TV input maxes out at 4K 60 and I don't want to buy another TV yet as this one is only 2 years old. And the mining crazy needs to end so I can get a 3080 or better. So maybe by 2022 if steam could support that...

 

[ElfDestruct]

With any of these solutions, you can get an experience that “feels” perfect... until you find out it’s not. I have about the most optimal streaming setup that is possible via steam and moonlight, and every game is playable. Then you try Hollow Knight bosses and wonder why you are just dead, dead, dead again. Take the controller to the PC and they are one-try kills.

Home streaming or cloud for anything non-competitive and non-twitch? Sure it can be fine. Skill games? No way. You can’t git gud when you’re already late by the time you see attacks.

 

[mikaelad]

It would be great to have Steam Link or Moonlight as a Xbox App. I currently have Steam Link and Xbox One next to each other but it would be great to play PC games through XBox.

Well, in theory one can use Wireless Display app but in reality it's performance is abysmal.

 

[Stoly]

At first I wasn't aware that Gametream only worked on the ShieldTV and that there's no client for other android devices, that's odd considering GeforceNow works on almost any android device.

I tried steamlink on my kids samsung tablet, its ok I guess, but its so much better on the shieldTV, mainly because both the PC and ShieldTV are on a wired network.

I rarely use gamestream on the shieldtv, actually I rather use GeforceNow, as that way both me and my kid can game without a 2nd gaming pc.

 

[Crunch]

Using Gamestream from PC to Shield hooked up to 85" TV for inhome streaming. Works a treat for controller-centric games. Mouse + Keyboard games I always sit at the computer.