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Steam Remote Play is absurdly good!

Kataploom

Gold Member
Yeah, what you just read, the thing is ABSURD.

I currently have 2 computers at home, one for gaming plugged to the living room TV and one for the general stuff, work, etc. Anyway, the office PC. Both are connected by cable.

The GPU of the office PC died for whatever reason (a 1050Ti I used for a second monitor some "very low" overwatch 2) and now I had a reason to get creative and tried the Remote Play option.

It played AMAZING, the caveat was the blurry and low IQ image, also that it was limited to 60 fps, but it was black magic to me anyway, I've been playing that way for a month already and the latency is great, way better than using Lossless Scaling for real 😂, then I realized I could play some shooters using M&K without having to spend on an dedicated GPU.

The problem was still the IQ (the 60 fps limit didn't bother me), but then I messed with Steam Remote Play options in the settings and KABOOM! 4K 144fps (max of the TV where that PC is plugged).

BTW, I'm really shocked by how great it works, this is just a hype thread about me getting happy about this and nothing else, I didn't really know it was this good of a feature, almost nobody is talking about this, damn...
 
Yup i used to have an ipad wall mounted next to the bed. attached a dualsense controller to it with BT.
And streamed pc games in native ipad screen resolution flawless.
 
Yeah, what you just read, the thing is ABSURD.

I currently have 2 computers at home, one for gaming plugged to the living room TV and one for the general stuff, work, etc. Anyway, the office PC. Both are connected by cable.

The GPU of the office PC died for whatever reason (a 1050Ti I used for a second monitor some "very low" overwatch 2) and now I had a reason to get creative and tried the Remote Play option.

It played AMAZING, the caveat was the blurry and low IQ image, also that it was limited to 60 fps, but it was black magic to me anyway, I've been playing that way for a month already and the latency is great, way better than using Lossless Scaling for real 😂, then I realized I could play some shooters using M&K without having to spend on an dedicated GPU.

The problem was still the IQ (the 60 fps limit didn't bother me), but then I messed with Steam Remote Play options in the settings and KABOOM! 4K 144fps (max of the TV where that PC is plugged).

BTW, I'm really shocked by how great it works, this is just a hype thread about me getting happy about this and nothing else, I didn't really know it was this good of a feature, almost nobody is talking about this, damn...
I got very mediocre results with it personally.
 
I use Moonlight on my Xbox Series S to stream from my PC with Sunshine to TV.
I've read that the Series consoles are some of the better clients for remote streaming, and it just works.
 
Used it on steam deck, had to turn off hardware decoding on it because it was broken and made the frametimes very unstable. With software decoding it worked very well.

I have an ally with SteamOS installed onto it and at least in the version I'm running the steam remoteplay is running very badly on it so I'm having to use moonlight on my ally. Main issue on moonlight is colorbanding.

But yes remoteplay/moonlight are fantastic. My pc upstairs with a WiFi 6 USB adapter can stream flawlessly to my handheld while I and the router are downstairs.

Easier to run games I'll play on Switch 2, but things like Cyberpunk or SW Outlaws where the switch 2 doesn't cut it I'll stream from my PC to another handheld.
 
It worked like shit for me. Then I changed some setting I could not remember. Something about turning off speed or banwith limit. Since then no stutters, delays or connection issues unlike PS Portal when my PS5 was wired via fucking ethernet.
 
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Use it to stream my upstairs pc to nvidia shield downstairs. Bit choppy via wifi.

Would I need to connect the pc or shield to a mesh wifi satellite for better results, I can only do one.
 
I'm hoping once the Frame is out, that Valve will do a big update to the quality of Steam Remote Play.

I use Moonlight when I'm streaming. But Steam's Remote Play Together is still a killer feature. Local co-op games over the Internet is great. Especially when you see Retroarch on Steam and it's enabled there.
 
I use it from time to time when steeaming games from my home PC to the computer in my gym's office.

I believe people who claim there are better options out there that you can "set up" with a bit of work, but here's the thing: I don't need to set up a fucking thing to make this shit work just fine when I decide to play something on a whim.

I click a button and everything just works.
 
Yep, that's the way to go. Steam Remote Play is unfortunately subpar.
Really? Damn... I'll keep this in mind if I ever decide to use the feature.

I remember trying Moonlight on my hacked Switch and was surprised at how well it played. I remember trying DMC V and it was perfectly playable without any sort of noticeable input lag.
 
It worked like shit for me. Then I changed some setting I could not remember. Something about turning off speed or banwith limit. Since then no stutters, delays or connection issues unlike PS Portal when my PS5 was wired via fucking ethernet.

If you ever remember the settings let me know, because it's unusable for me. Lag, delay and connections issues are something I still experience constantly when I try to use it (And yes, my internet is good).
 
Really? Damn... I'll keep this in mind if I ever decide to use the feature.

I remember trying Moonlight on my hacked Switch and was surprised at how well it played. I remember trying DMC V and it was perfectly playable without any sort of noticeable input lag.

It's not really a latency problem or anything like that. If you ever used remote streaming from a console, it's basically that in terms of video quality. Switch over to Moonlight and suddenly the video looks so much better. It's the same quality you can get out of GeForce Now, but entirely on your own hardware.

Using the Moonlight fork Apollo you also get nice features like virtual monitors. This comes in handy as it will create a fake monitor that makes the resolution/refresh rate of your local monitor. So when you are streaming, it disconnects any physical monitors and automatically enabled the virtual monitor. I have a PC connected to a 4K/120Hz TV, but on my desk use a 3440x1440 ultrawide. Switching between where I play, the resolution moves correctly. Though it is down to how games handle the resolution switch themselves.
 
Yeah, it got way better.

Set it to Performance mode in the options and it works well 1000 miles away assuming wired connections on both sides.

Had a friend play Contra Operation Galuga that way and he had very few issues. Completed the whole campaign 2 player.
 
Moonlight with Apollo works amazing for handhelds but I tried it on my 77" TV and it's pretty crappy the frame pacing is all off and when your playing at 4K you need a huge bitrate which makes it quite cumbersome.

I ended up building a local bazzite machine with a 9070xt and some older parts I had lying around for years. Works a dream.
 
I use it from time to time when steeaming games from my home PC to the computer in my gym's office.

I believe people who claim there are better options out there that you can "set up" with a bit of work, but here's the thing: I don't need to set up a fucking thing to make this shit work just fine when I decide to play something on a whim.

I click a button and everything just works.
so i could use remote play to play on my laptop at work on slow days??? might have to look into this. but i assume my home PC would just have to be running all day for when i want to access it.
 
You can stream directly to your television if you use steam link.

It gets choppy now and then (on wifi) but it works.
 
so i could use remote play to play on my laptop at work on slow days??? might have to look into this. but i assume my home PC would just have to be running all day for when i want to access it.
If your router supports it, or you have something else on your home network. You can remote in and then trigger a wake on LAN (WoL). This can wake up your PC so you can start streaming. The Moonlight client integrates this directly so you can wake a sleeping server.

This only works from sleep, not fully off. Additionally it has to be from your local home network. WoL packets don't traverse VPNs without some non-minor network tweaking.
 
Definitely, surprisingly effective. I use it often enough at work to play things my laptop can't run - just remote play from my desktop at home. Works pretty well the vast majority of the time with very light latency, I was also impressed.
 
Really? Damn... I'll keep this in mind if I ever decide to use the feature.

I remember trying Moonlight on my hacked Switch and was surprised at how well it played. I remember trying DMC V and it was perfectly playable without any sort of noticeable input lag.
Yeah, Moonlight / Sunshine is definitely the way to go. A lot better image quality and latency vs Steam Remote. Valve hasn't really updated the latter in ages I feel.
 
Anyone that's used just normal streaming, there's always that slight blur/fuzziness to the image.

Moonlight and GeForce Now is razor sharp and looks like the display is directly connected to the computer if you don't run into bandwidth issues. It's well worth the additional work to complete the initial setup.
 
Sunshine/Moonlight looks better and has lower latency for me. It's a night and day difference on a 97 oled.

When Steam catches up, I will make the switch. That being said, I think Valve should be focusing on improving Steam Chat! Now would be the time to capitalize on being a Discord replacement.
 
Sunshine/Moonlight looks better and has lower latency for me. It's a night and day difference on a 97 oled.

When Steam catches up, I will make the switch. That being said, I think Valve should be focusing on improving Steam Chat! Now would be the time to capitalize on being a Discord replacement.
What should they be doing to Steam Chat? You can already have one on one, and multiple groups that you can chat with and also fire it up as a voice/video chat.

Trying to get Discord's server concept along with all the channels is pretty bad. Honestly I hate Discord and prefer forums much more. Discord added threads to try to help organize, but the IRC nature just doesn't work well. And going back and trying to find information is pretty much impossible. The only thing I could see would maybe integrating Steam's forums to chat, so if you have a thread open it could work like a chat session.

The thing I'd like to see would be APIs to let a game create temporary voice chat rooms. Then a game could use Steam voice chat for in-game comms. And the temporary nature would mean it worked with random match making and once you are out of the session or grouping, then the session is dead. And maybe extending that to support two level like a multi squad raiding party. Where individual squads are changing to their members. But a leader from each squad have a separate chat with just the other leaders. And then a commander type roll which can broadcast to all players.
 
I use Moonlight on my Xbox Series S to stream from my PC with Sunshine to TV.
I've read that the Series consoles are some of the better clients for remote streaming, and it just works.
Grok just recommended that to me, maybe it's finally time to ditch one computer and give the living room a cleaner look
 
I was trying to use it to play Mewgenics on my phone, and it didn't work. It rendered the game at an improper resolution, and then just didn't work at all (black screen) on subsequent tries.

Could have been an issue with Mewgenics, I guess.
 
so i could use remote play to play on my laptop at work on slow days??? might have to look into this. but i assume my home PC would just have to be running all day for when i want to access it.
You can wake it on lan, that's what I did and it's great, actually the idea came first from me wanting to run local LLM models on my gaming PC and doing the setup then realizing the full unleashed power I had in my hands
 
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