High CPU and poor frame capture (solved)

[Suros:/#]

So I got my Steam Link today and was expecting fairly excellent results. What I got was a crippling amount of CPU usage and poor framerates. What's confusing about all this is that I've had better results out of an 8 year old laptop using software decoding over WiFi.

For some reason, the Steam Link is causing software encoding to be exceptionally heavy (avg 54% CPU from Steam) and it's bottlenecking the more demanding games. The Link's stats are showing 60 (sometimes 30) frames per second, but I'm seeing something around 10-15. I get the impression that something isn't jiving here. I'm simply assuming that it's hardware encoding, but I have no view of the individual threads. Perhaps it's a matter of waiting for a client update?

Relevant host specs:
Linux Mint 17.2 kernel 4.2.0-18
i5-4670k @ 3.8GHz
16GB DDR3 @ 1866MHz
Nvidia GTX 770 4GB

Edit: Tests were conducted on both LED TV and LED monitor at 1080p 60fps.

Edit2: The only thing that will fix this is for Valve to get hardware encoding going in the Linux client. FFMPEG had this done months ago.

[Tucu]

A few things you can try with your setup:
-Sign-in to the Steam client beta
-Enable hardware encoding
-Do not use the Unlimited bandwidth setting
-Use wired ethernet during testing to remove one variable
-Check with a tool like RealTemp the frequency your CPU is working at under load. I had a problem last week where my i5 2500K was limited to 1.6Ghz after waking from sleep mode. It was my fault for messing with the BIOS.
-Enable the performance stats overlay and post results for someone to take a look

[Suros:/#]

Originally posted by Tucu:

A few things you can try with your setup:
-Sign-in to the Steam client beta
-Enable hardware encoding
-Do not use the Unlimited bandwidth setting
-Use wired ethernet during testing to remove one variable
-Check with a tool like RealTemp the frequency your CPU is working at under load. I had a problem last week where my i5 2500K was limited to 1.6Ghz after waking from sleep mode. It was my fault for messing with the BIOS.
-Enable the performance stats overlay and post results for someone to take a look

Thanks for the suggestions. Here's a checklist and I'll edit with results.

-Have been using beta client for years
-Hardware encoding has not been added to the Linux client yet
-Will attempt lowering bandwidth [multiple bandwidth caps were tried with no change to results]
-Have already tried wired and wireless
-CPU was clocked to 3800MHz and running at 58c
-Stats overlay reported 20ms video delay and 0.3ms input delay, bitrate averaged 20Mbps

[PhonicUK]

The lack of hardware accelerated encoding is the issue, software encoding is going to absolutely kill your performance. I'm afraid you're likely SOL using Linux as the streaming host until VALVe add support for hardware encoding to the Linux client.

[Suros:/#]

Originally posted by PhonicUK:

The lack of hardware accelerated encoding is the issue, software encoding is going to absolutely kill your performance. I'm afraid you're likely SOL using Linux as the streaming host until VALVe add support for hardware encoding to the Linux client.

I know how rough it is to do software encoding, but that still leaves me to wonder why it functions so well on my junky old laptop. The Steam Link is performing worse while doing nothing but streaming the desktop than my laptop was doing while streaming Distance at maximum detail.

[Tucu]

Originally posted by Suros#:

Originally posted by PhonicUK:

The lack of hardware accelerated encoding is the issue, software encoding is going to absolutely kill your performance. I'm afraid you're likely SOL using Linux as the streaming host until VALVe add support for hardware encoding to the Linux client.

I know how rough it is to do software encoding, but that still leaves me to wonder why it functions so well on my junky old laptop. The Steam Link is performing worse while doing nothing but streaming the desktop than my laptop was doing while streaming Distance at maximum detail.

Was your old laptop connected to the same TV? If not, what resolution is the laptop display?

[Suros:/#]

Originally posted by Tucu:

Originally posted by Suros#:

I know how rough it is to do software encoding, but that still leaves me to wonder why it functions so well on my junky old laptop. The Steam Link is performing worse while doing nothing but streaming the desktop than my laptop was doing while streaming Distance at maximum detail.

Was your old laptop connected to the same TV? If not, what resolution is the laptop display?

You know, you just got me to think about something. I bet it's scaling to 720p for that laptop. Good thinking sir! Just need to figure out how to get the Steam Link to request a lower resolution to test it out. If I figure it out, I'll post the results.

[Tucu]

Originally posted by Suros#:

Originally posted by Tucu:

Was your old laptop connected to the same TV? If not, what resolution is the laptop display?

You know, you just got me to think about something. I bet it's scaling to 720p for that laptop. Good thinking sir! Just need to figure out how to get the Steam Link to request a lower resolution to test it out. If I figure it out, I'll post the results.

There is a Resolution Limit (or similar) setting under Advanced Options in the Streaming menu

[Suros:/#]

Originally posted by Tucu:

Originally posted by Suros#:

You know, you just got me to think about something. I bet it's scaling to 720p for that laptop. Good thinking sir! Just need to figure out how to get the Steam Link to request a lower resolution to test it out. If I figure it out, I'll post the results.

There is a Resolution Limit (or similar) setting under Advanced Options in the Streaming menu

Found it. I do believe that gives me the answer. Framerate and control response took a sharp increase over previous tests. Thank you for the help. Least this knowledge makes reduced quality streaming viable.

Now I just have to wonder when either Quick Sync or NVENC will be supported.