To all potential buyers with a low-end PC: Read this first!

[KorganoS]

Sure, the idea sounds really nice. Putting your old PC somewhere else, then stream it to your living room PC. But one thing that Valve did not express clearly: You need a fast multicore PC to enjoy lag-free gaming.

My PC:
Intel Dual Core E6500 2.95GHz (Wolfdale 2c/2t) @4.5 GHz
Radeon HD 5850 1GB 725/1000 @800/1100
Seagate 240 Gaming SSD
RAM 6GB 800MHz @1050MHz
Wifi 801.11g dual-band

My PC can run almost everything I throw at it High@40-55fps 900p, except DA:I, Watch Dogs, and some other badly optimized games.

I've tried Steam's home streaming feature, to stream Hawken, Portal 2 and Warframe to my 2011 Macbook Pro - 900p. The result is horrible low frame rate 15-30fps, and input lag everywhere. I tried to find out the reason why. I swapped my router with my friend's Netgear AC, still lag. I use Gigabit p2p, still low frame rate.

Until I use RivaTuner stat server and found out that Steam encodes the stream real-time and maxing both of my cores 100% all the time. Then I tried to stream using my friend's QX9650 rig. It runs mighty fine at 720p, but not at 1080p. Then I tried on an i5 2500K @4GHz rig, it was smooth as butter @1080p.

I suspect that Steam Link uses the same tech: It will encode your gameplay display into a video, at the target screen's resolution, then send it wirelessly, and use Steam Link's H/W to decode it. Network latency will not affect the performance much, because they use something as efficient (if not more efficient than) h.265 standards.

So, just sharing this finding out there. Hopefully this can add to your research before purchasing. I personally love the idea of reducing cable tangles in my home, who doesn't? But I will prioritize my budget for upgrading first. (I also need fast rig for Cardboard VR @1080p unfortunately)

[frostedflakesofdoom]

very good info....
makes me wonder if it will use the extra cores in a 6-8 core proccesor...
or utilze the multi-threading intel uses?
It could also be affected by having the memory to support the additional process....

[K]

If you have hardware encoding like intel quicksync or a newer amd/nvidia GPU it takes a huge load off.

[KorganoS]

Originally posted by |☠| Franz Müller:

If you have hardware encoding like intel quicksync or a newer amd/nvidia GPU it takes a huge load off.

Indeed, I think quicksync can help a lot with h.264, and even with latest driver for >Haswell/Broadwell IGP, it supports HEVC, which is.. amazing. But Nvidia's and AMD's solution for full hardware HEVC encode/decode is still questionable, so let's hope that Valve use a more friendlier h.264 format or similar, and they did a thorough testing with different platforms and configurations.

[KorganoS]

Originally posted by frostedflakesofdoom:

very good info....
makes me wonder if it will use the extra cores in a 6-8 core proccesor...
or utilze the multi-threading intel uses?
It could also be affected by having the memory to support the additional process....

I don't think memory is a big issue. But I agree that multi-threading is indeed the key to good encoding performance.
And while we're on the topic about multi-threading, hopefully the upcoming DirectX 12 can help with distributing the workload more evenly (not that I can gain much from my current 7 years old rig lol, but it'll be nice for everybody else)