My steam deck is underpowered as a living room gaming PC.
Wish it was cheaper but would look forward to a “just works” experience including sleep/instant game resume.
Add my thousands of already owned Steam games and it makes me excited for a great couch gaming experience. It’s the reason I don’t get a PS5/Switch cause I don’t wanna rebuy all the games and they are not on sale as much.
If you already have a powerful desktop PC in your house, streaming via Sunshine/Moonlight is pretty much perfect these days.
I honestly can't understand this. It's ok for games where latency and lag don't matter much but otherwise it's pretty bad.
I have even connected 2 computers directly with an ethernet cable to rule out my networking gear and it was ok but very very far from perfect!
Not to mention the experience is clunky at best. Switching resolution, losing settings, dealing with encoding/decoding, etc.
I'm looking at the performance stats streaming a game to my living room PC right now, and total latency is about 4-5ms, which would be unnoticeable even on a 120hz TV.
It does sound like some people do have pretty good results with it, but my experience is really not unique (I know personally many others who have similar).
With that in mind, I maintain that this stuff is very very far from perfect.
Yeah i've used moonlight/sunshine a handful of times and it's absolutely perfect, I couldn't even tell in most cases it was streamed.
I have had a very clunky experience historically. But I tried the built in steam game streaming over the local network to my steam deck and this time the experience was flawless.
I feel like the problem is a very large number of rough edges and software bugs, hardware issues, etc. But it's so possible to stream over the local network with zero noticeable latency. Only if all the stars align and there are no bugs.
I played Celeste using Steam Link from my PC over wifi to an Nvidia Shield and it worked good about 99% of the time. Is the tech perfect? No, but it does work great a lot of the time.
I can vouch for it being really great for me as well (as others pointed out). But I use Apollo instead of Sunshine. It has some superior things baked in, including easy resolution/monitor handling. Maybe give it a shot.
Thanks, I might give it a try if I ever look into this stuff again.
I use a dedicated capture card ($250ish Elgato 4K X) over Thunderbolt to access my desktop. I can't imagine putting up with any higher latency than that.
The chroma encoding is a little disappointing, but I don't think there's any way to bypass it, even at 1080p.
Its not too bad. I played through animal well, a platformer, which requires quite a few tricky jumps, but I did connect the controller to my PC instead. Adequate for most couch gaming but I wouldn't play cs2 or similar competitive game with a controller anyway.
I was wondering if this would be a worthwhile upgrade to my Legion Go Z1 Extreme.
Sounds like it's in the same vicinity for graphics power. Not worth $1k for a tiny bit more RAM.
I do wonder if this will give me any useful presets, in the same way the Steam Deck does. I have no interest in tweaking graphics settings one at a time.
Have you tried Steam Remote Play? It allows your desktop to render games and stream it to your Steam Deck that's connected to your TV. Or to any other device really.