Display lags by several seconds. [SOLVED]

[Silicon Dystopia]

I got everything set up and working OK without too much drama on my Pi 3. I didn't know about Buster being best so I had Bullseye but running from the console worked fine. The problem is, any movement on the display lags by several seconds. The computer Steam is running on uses a 1440p monitor so I thought that scaling might be the issue. I dropped the display settings to the lowest (720p) and the lag went away. I tried setting it to the native resolution of the monitor the Pi is using (1080p) and the lag is back. I have the GPU set at 128M.

Is there something about my setup causing the lag? (Running from console, using Bullseye, not enough GPU mem seem like options) or am I just out of luck with this hardware choice? The connection is wired and tested up to 90M so I think that should be OK.

[Silicon Dystopia]

I just tried the 1080p and bitrate at 30 and setting to "fast". It seemed to help but the lag is still inexcusably slow. Ping time is under 1ms. I'll try the GPU setting on the Pi. I guess I also have a different PC with a better GPU I can give a try. My hardware encoding may not be all that, I guess (R9 270).

[Silicon Dystopia]

I don't :)

[Silicon Dystopia]

Going to an RX580 didn't help just fwiw.

[Silicon Dystopia]

No luck. Tried every combination I could think of of hardware decoding on the client and host. One combination seemed to make it worse. Confirmed that it's a 3B so at least there's that. Next option is to try a different client (PC if I can) then try the 32-bit OS.

Unfortunately, I don't have a Nvidia card to test with and I'm not likely to for the foreseeable future.

[Silicon Dystopia]

Like I say, I tried disabling the hardware encoding but no luck. Direct connection is better for sure but this would be for occasional use where dragging a full system around complicates things too much. I wish we had some specs for minimum requirements for the different encoding options.

Edit: So I installed steamlink on the pc with the R9-270 (remote computer RX-580) and remote play is *crisp*. So it may not be the RPi hardware but it could be the OS. Time to roll it back. (The RX-580 actually has the weaker CPU fwiw)

[Silicon Dystopia]

Well, I finally locked it down. Undervolting. Or more likely the USB cable I'm using just isn't up to it. I have my bench supply up to 6V and it's drawing approx 0.5A (though the one I'm currently trying claims to be a fast charge cable so should be a bit beefier). I did try running directly from the 5V from a hard-drive connector off the PSU but the Pi wouldn't even boot.

I had no idea that the Pi would throttle things that severely when undervolted. It may explain a completely unrelated issue I had a few years ago. Though funnily enough, the client part of the UI was responding fine. It was just the lag on the streaming.

An interesting thing is if I start undervolted than crank up to the 6V, the streaming doesn't improve. I have to stop streaming and restart steamlink before things get better.

As an aside, to save anyone who is following my efforts, the terminal-only version of the OS does not come with all the libraries steamlink requires. I got the version with the desktop and configured it to boot to the terminal with raspi-conf.