Any way to stream games from PC to PC?

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Feb 5, 2007
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Anyone know of a remote desktop or remote desktop like solution to stream games from one PC to another? There are ways to stream games from the cloud, stream games to a Vita, and with Windows 10 you can stream Xbox One games to PC, but what about PC to PC? All the remote desktop things Ive tried dont work in fullscreen mode, have horrible lag, or cant be used with a mouse because it goes haywire.
 
You can add nonsteam games to steam and them stream PC to PC using steam in home streaming. But that has to be done within your network.

I have yet to find a good solution that allows you to do the same remotely.
 
I heard the steam streaming was in beta with a lot of bugs. Gunna try this out and see how bad the latency is, and if the video quality is as high as the original or if its compressed and looks like shit. I can imagine it would be pretty horrible though on both counts.
 
Steam In-Home Streaming is solid on ethernet networks. Once you cross to WiFi, Powerline or MOCA adapters, it's not so good.
 
Steam In-Home Streaming is solid on ethernet networks. Once you cross to WiFi, Powerline or MOCA adapters, it's not so good.

It's only solid for anything that isn't particularly fast-paced. You won't be pleased playing twitch shooters or really anything that requires any degree of immediacy in terms of reaction time. I've tried a number of games out with it and stuff like strategy games are fine, but even relatively slow paced action like that in Skyrim is so lagged out it's not worth the effort.
 
I have read good things about Hamachi. It's a zero-configuration VPN utility. It may be obfuscated on the site, but I believe it is free to use for up to 5 devices.

I heard the steam streaming was in beta with a lot of bugs. Gunna try this out and see how bad the latency is, and if the video quality is as high as the original or if its compressed and looks like shit. I can imagine it would be pretty horrible though on both counts.
It has been out of beta for quite awhile now. The image quality is actually really good. I had no problems with latency myself, but your mileage will vary depending on all the fail points in your network configuration.

It's only solid for anything that isn't particularly fast-paced. You won't be pleased playing twitch shooters or really anything that requires any degree of immediacy in terms of reaction time. I've tried a number of games out with it and stuff like strategy games are fine, but even relatively slow paced action like that in Skyrim is so lagged out it's not worth the effort.
I played Wolfenstein: TNO for 3 hours without this issue. Like I said, your mileage will vary. My source PC was connected via a 50' cat6 ethernet cable and the capture device was a laptop connected wirelessly over 802.11n approximately 30 feet from router.
 
yeah, i played bioshock infinite over steam streaming. 1080p max settings. No problems at all. But my Desktop is hardwired into my router and then im using wireless ac to go from my router to me laptop. Also, I was only sitting about 15 feet away from my router with no walls. A+ experience.

I've tried the same with wireless n and have had mixed results. Also, the further you get away from the router and the more dropoff you will experince.
 
You can add your notepad.exe as a steam game and launch it remotely and you can stream your whole desktop. (Just don't close notepad)
 
The Steam streaming kills my FPS though. I have a solid, very high end PC, and my frame rate with Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky becomes unplayable with Steam streaming. That isn't exactly a powerhouse of a game, being released over 10 years ago.
 
The Steam streaming kills my FPS though. I have a solid, very high end PC, and my frame rate with Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky becomes unplayable with Steam streaming. That isn't exactly a powerhouse of a game, being released over 10 years ago.
On the client machine, or even the host shows its slowing down? I'm wired for Cat6 so will have to try this out this weekend.
 
I would need to do it from home to work, not on a local network. I tried Hamachi and Steam but it doesnt work, and I tried all the trouble shooting fixes for the "cant connect to network adapter" error or whatever its called
 
On the client machine, or even the host shows its slowing down? I'm wired for Cat6 so will have to try this out this weekend.

This was on the host machine. The game dropped into single digits, and I can run games like Assassin's Creed: Unity at a constant 60 fps. I have no clue what Steam does to stream, but it's pretty terrible.
 
I have read good things about Hamachi. It's a zero-configuration VPN utility. It may be obfuscated on the site, but I believe it is free to use for up to 5 devices.

It has been out of beta for quite awhile now. The image quality is actually really good. I had no problems with latency myself, but your mileage will vary depending on all the fail points in your network configuration.

I played Wolfenstein: TNO for 3 hours without this issue. Like I said, your mileage will vary. My source PC was connected via a 50' cat6 ethernet cable and the capture device was a laptop connected wirelessly over 802.11n approximately 30 feet from router.

Hamachi is a decent software based VPN solution to use to access something like documents on a remote network. It will introduce far too much latency to use for game streaming, if it's even possible.
 
The Steam streaming kills my FPS though. I have a solid, very high end PC, and my frame rate with Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky becomes unplayable with Steam streaming. That isn't exactly a powerhouse of a game, being released over 10 years ago.

This was on the host machine. The game dropped into single digits, and I can run games like Assassin's Creed: Unity at a constant 60 fps. I have no clue what Steam does to stream, but it's pretty terrible.

Something is buggy on your end. I've run several AAA titles at max settings and have noticed very little performance impact. What kind of processor are you using? The host machine is running the game, but it is also encoding the video that it is sending to the client. To me, it sounds like you are using an old cpu that doesnt work well with the codec steam uses.
 
Something is buggy on your end. I've run several AAA titles at max settings and have noticed very little performance impact. What kind of processor are you using? The host machine is running the game, but it is also encoding the video that it is sending to the client. To me, it sounds like you are using an old cpu that doesnt work well with the codec steam uses.

I'm using an Intel i7 5960x. As I said, the game's almost 10 years old, and it's certainly not taxing the system. But the frame rate plummets to single digits when streaming.
 
I'm using an Intel i7 5960x. As I said, the game's almost 10 years old, and it's certainly not taxing the system. But the frame rate plummets to single digits when streaming.

Did you try running any network monitoring programs while it was streaming? I'm guessing the issue is tied up in their rather than the physical system
 
Did you try running any network monitoring programs while it was streaming? I'm guessing the issue is tied up in their rather than the physical system

Yes. Bandwidth is hardly taxed, CPU is hardly taxed, GPU is hardly taxed. Even recording via FRAPS doesn't drop the frame rate, and I can stream via Twitch without dropping it. Only Steams recording messes things up to unplayable levels.
 
I just tried Steam streaming to do FFXIV from my desktop to my laptop and even though there was a little delay, it was nothing worth noting. I was really impressed.

Games like Dota/CSGO it's unplayable because a little bit of lag would be disaster, but other games are good.
 
You can do it with nVidia GeForce Experience and Limelight. GFE has streaming that uses the same hardware as Shadowplay. It is made to work with their Shield devices, and works really well in that regard. However some clever people looked at the protocol and made a general purpose program called Limelight that you can get for tablet and PC that'll work with it. Very low latency and quite good quality. No performance impact at all really since the GPU has dedicated hardware for it.

The computer that is the source needs to have a GTX 650 or newer and GeForce Experience installed to do it.
 
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