Steam Link App on Sony Bravia X900F - Assassins Creed Specific Resolution Issues and NvFBC

[TheIvoryKitty]

My husband and I purchased a Sony Bravia X900F 4k android TV with the Steam Link app on it and have been testing attempting to play games on it.

We already have many SteamLink boxes, but this is the first time we've had the app.

------- NvFBC Bug --------

The first issue we ran into was that ALL of the test games streamed from my Husband's PC to the Steam App would only show the top left portion of the screen, while ALL of the test games streamed from my own PC to the Steam App would show the whole screen properly.

After days of testing, we found out that the NvFBC option in the 'In Home Steaming' section of the Steam settings (on the individual PC's Steam, not the App itself) is what caused the issue. Whenever NvFBC is checked, we only get the top left side of the game frames to show on the screen while Streaming with the Steam App. When it is not checked, we get the entire game frame to show properly while streaming with the Steam App.

This bug appears to be specifically in the Steam App, since we do not have that issue while using the Steam Link boxes with the same NvFBC setting checked on.

------ Unknown Assassin's Creed Bug -------

The second issue we are still currently having appears to be specifically related to Assassin's Creed. We tried "Assassin's Creed: Origins" and "Assassin's Creed II" on both computers streaming to the Steam Link App, and the stream still only shows the top left side of the screen (no matter the NvFBC setting on/off). Interestingly, this is the same error that NvFBC was causing when we had it turned on.

We thought it might be the UPlay app, but we both started Anno 2070, and for both computers, the stream shows the proper full screen frame via the Steam Link App. So, the Uplay overlay does not appear to be the issue.

The Assassin's Creed games are the only ones that we have found to have this top-left-frame issue (now that we have NvFBC turned off on both computers).

What is extremely interesting (and frustrating) is that we have actually gotten Assassin's Creed:Origins to show up properly (full screen) on the stream App a grand total of 3 times through, quite literally, hours of testing and trying to make it work. However, there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to why it worked. Another test with exactly the same settings will go back to producing the top-left-only effect 98% of the time.

As a programmer, I know that computers don't just do things for fun - with the exact same conditions, one should always be able to expect the same result. In this case, we cannot figure out what that condition is. It just appears completely random, and almost always fails to function properly.

As I mentioned, though, this only appears to effect Assassin's Creed, specifically, and only while using the Steam Link App. The game runs without any resolution issues on the physical Steam Link box.

------------------

Has anyone else had this issue? I would be very interested to hear about it.

Thanks!

[slouken]

Out of curiosity, does your husband have desktop scaling enabled?

[TheIvoryKitty]

Originally posted by slouken:

Out of curiosity, does your husband have desktop scaling enabled?

Good morning, and thank you so much for your quick reply!

Neither my husband nor I use desktop scaling via Windows Display settings. Husband uses the Nvidia Control Panel -> Manage 3D Settings -> DSR - Factors for some games. This is Nvidia's "Dynamic Super Resolution" which renders a game at a high resolution and then downscales it to the native resolution of the display using filtering.

This immediately came to mind while testing, which is why we started testing with my computer additionally. I am a 'default settings' kind of person, and have never used Resolution Scaling or Nvidia DSR on my PC. We additionally tested Husband's computer with DSR turned entirely off, for good measure.

For both of our computers (regardless of DSR settings on or off) turning ON the "NVFBC" setting under Steam -> Settings -> In Home Streaming -> Advanced Host Options causes the Steam Link App to only show the top left quadrant of all games tested. Turning OFF that same Steam "NVFBC" setting has all games we tested (except for Assassins Creed) render properly full screen.

For both of our computers, 'Assassins Creed II' and 'Assassins Creed: Origins' only show the top left quadrant of the screen, even with the Steam "NVFBC" setting turned off.

Our relevant system information is as follows:

===== Wife System Info: =====
Operating System Version: Windows 10 (64 bit)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Video Card Driver: 417.01 Release Date 11/26/2018
Video Card DirectX Driver Version: 25.21.14.1701
Number of Monitors: 2
Primary Display Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Primary Display Size: 23.46" x 13.19" (26.89" diag) 59.6cm x 33.5cm (68.3cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 6143 MB
Memory RAM: 32687 Mb

===== Husband System Info: =====
Operating System Version: Windows 10 (64 bit)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
Video Card Driver: 417.01 Release Date 11/26/2018
Video Card DirectX Driver Version: 25.21.14.1701
Number of Monitors: 2
Primary Display Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Primary Display Size: 23.54" x 13.23" (26.97" diag) 59.8cm x 33.6cm (68.5cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 11263 MB
Memory RAM: 16269 Mb

Please let me know if I can provide you with any other information on this! I saw that there is a new NVIDIA GeForce graphics driver available which appears to have just been released today. I am going to install that and see if it changes anything. EDIT: The new video driver did not resolve either problem on either computer.

Thank you!!