Pixelated picture when playing Rise of the Tomb Raider

[Sclurp]

Hello all,

I can't get my head around this and maybe you lot have a fix. When I play Rise of the Tomb Raider on my TV via Steam Link, it looks extra pixelated for some reason. Like I'm watching a youtube video at 720p. I have checked all the game settings and Steam Link settings I could - I set SL's quality settings to highest as I have an ethernet cable and so that should all be good. Shouldn't be any problems hardware wise. Yet it still looks a bit pants.

I find it mostly occurs when there's particular types of lighting or fog/ dusty effects. You instantly start seeing blocks and pixels and what not. I don't seem to have this problem with other games. I just tried out Alien Isolation and Doom and the same problems very rarely occur.

Any Steam Link users have a way to improve the visual quality? Unfortunately my PC monitor is a bit rubbish so right now I have a high end pc running a very pretty game on its highest settings no less but with the option of two rubbish screens to present it all haha.

Thanks for any help.

[toidi]

Under advanced host settings (steam client) make sure to untick allow resolution change to improve performance. Also if you switch to the beta branch on the link and steam clients, there is a setting for 50 Meg streaming (much better clarity as opposed to 30).

[Sclurp]

Originally posted by toidi:

Under advanced host settings (steam client) make sure to untick allow resolution change to improve performance. Also if you switch to the beta branch on the link and steam clients, there is a setting for 50 Meg streaming (much better clarity as opposed to 30).

Thank you, I shall investigate :)


Update: Ah, now the performance has gone from 60fps down to what must be below 30...will have to see if I can tweak things.

[Sclurp]

It looks like I can't get above 30FPS which is really odd. I don't understand how this technology works if it's basically streaming whats going on in my pc (which can push this game up to 60FPS) and just tweaking a few things makes it all plummet.

[toidi]

If you have v sync turned on that can drop your fps to 30 if it doesn't quite hit 60 consistently.

[slouken]

This is common with hardware encoding. Software encoding is actually better visual quality, though smoke is always hard on the H.264 video encoder. Try disabling hardware encoding in the advanced streaming host settings on your PC and see if that helps? You can do this from the Steam overlay while the game is running to see the difference.

[Sclurp]

Great, thank you for your suggestions - I shall try them out now.

:)

[Sclurp]

Nope. Steam Link doesn't want to play nicely. I disabled V Sync, unticked Hardware Encoding and then played about with different combinations of other settings to try and get something out of this. Nadda. I was getting 30FPS that dipped to 28 every other second creating a stuttering effect which is very distracting.

I would be fine with not achieving 60FPS if I could get a steady 30 but the moment I look at anything with interesting geometry there's a big drop.

I tried lowering the in game resolution to 720p and achieved a steady 45fps. But that's not what I want. Valve are selling Steam Link stating that it features a perfect HD stream of your PC games when it is actually really degrading the quality and potential of high end machines. if I wanted to play this game at a lower resolution, I would've bought it for my PS4 and saved myself all this hassle.

At this stage I'm thinking of giving up and selling it and figuring out a HDMI solution.

Unless anyone has any other tips?

[toidi]

Just tried it on my sons rig and it appears that the game does take quite a hit when trying to stream. It is only the second game that I have seen that drops significantly whilst streaming (can't remember the first off-hand).
There might be a cfg file that could be tweaked somewhere to boost performance, I will have a search around and see what I can come up with.

[toidi]

Maybe try some of the settings outlined here for the time being: http://www.pcgamer.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider-optimization-guide/

[Sclurp]

Thank you, from what I gathered, it just seems like Rise of the Tomb Raider is just an incredibly taxing game. Unless you want it to look a bit rubbish. So I'm torn - my expectations from Steam Link was that it would provide a visual experience that mirrors what would normally be displayed on my PC monitor but that just isn't the case.

I feel like Valve are sort of lying about it.

I will say that yes, there will be games that will demand more from hardware - but then isn't that sort of the point? Aren't we supposed to switch over from consoles to high end PCs, get those games on our TVs and play with the highest performance/ visual quality? Yet it's just not happening at all.

Thank you for all your help - officially giving up though. But thank you - I do appreciate you going out your way to assist me.

[toidi]

No worries, glad to be of help. If I were you I wouldn't let just the odd game drive you away from the link. With it and the steam controller I hardly ever touch my pc for gaming now. Other taxing games run absolutely fine, such as Ark, fallout, just cause 3 and plenty more. With the steam controller I've actually managed to play mouse based games to great effect as well. Anno 1404, planet coaster and x com 2 being just a couple of the many that work great.
Now if there was only a way to get photoshop playing nicely with this setup, I might not need to go near my pc ever again ;)

[Sclurp]

Originally posted by toidi:

No worries, glad to be of help. If I were you I wouldn't let just the odd game drive you away from the link. With it and the steam controller I hardly ever touch my pc for gaming now. Other taxing games run absolutely fine, such as Ark, fallout, just cause 3 and plenty more. With the steam controller I've actually managed to play mouse based games to great effect as well. Anno 1404, planet coaster and x com 2 being just a couple of the many that work great.
Now if there was only a way to get photoshop playing nicely with this setup, I might not need to go near my pc ever again ;)

I will say, Doom is nearly flawless - but Ark and a few other games are a bit iffy on it