Steam Remote Play Win 10 to Ubuntu Looking Good

While Proton works pretty good, there are of course many games that are still Windows only. Since I have two machines running, my main one on Linux Ubuntu now and a spare Win 10 machine, I decide to try Remote Play (new name for In-Home Streaming). It actually works well.

Here are some pics for the client on Ubuntu 2560x1080 21:9 ultrawide and the host on Windows 10 1920x1080 (I created a custom res for the host for 2560x1080, which looks squished on the host monitor but transmits correctly to the client).





Picture quality is basically the same as a native render after I tweaked settings. My monitors are high refresh so I tried for 120 Hz (probably the most I can expect from streaming) and it was able to hold up. Granted, it was not as smooth as true native 120 fps, but it looked better than 60 Hz for sure. There is also some input lag, but playing with the controller it was about what you expect from playing on a console. Not optimal, but perfectly playable.

Now that I know this works, this gives me more reason to not have to boot into Windows on this machine, at least for the Steam games that will work. I'd much rather use Proton if supported, but this is a nice fallback for Windows only games. Apparently you can also do this with games from other stores (Origin, Epic) just by adding the exe to your Steam library.

I think this is a very convenient option, rather than rebooting and dual booting all the time. I've heard people do headless setups for the host, so you could have a Windows machine hiding in a closet somewhere and play the games on Linux. Honestly quite good.