Speed capped at 100 Mpbs?

[WrathOfSammy]

I am trying to run Steam Link on a new Apple TV. My house is wired for gigibit speed throughout. Both my Apple TV and PC independently test at > 300 Mbps to the Internet. But my Steam Link speed seems to be capped at 100 Mbps. Is there any reason for this? I can't find any setting. I contacted support, but they were unable to help me.

[slouken]

Visual quality doesn't increase above 100 Mbps, and most encoders/decoders can't handle that high of a bitrate.

[WrathOfSammy]

Originally posted by slouken:

Visual quality doesn't increase above 100 Mbps, and most encoders/decoders can't handle that high of a bitrate.

The issue is not the visual quality. It is good enough for me. The issue is the latency. It is too slow for most of my games, which basically makes it unusable. There should not be any reason why my speed is capped like this.

[JlnPrssnr]

Then you have another separate issue, the 100MBit cap is not causing it to be slow. Check the ping and display latency readings on the performance overlay

[Davidoff]

In fact the high bandwidth could very well exacerbate the latency. Higher b/w = higher latency due to increased time to encode/decode stream.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by WrathOfSammy:

Originally posted by slouken:

Visual quality doesn't increase above 100 Mbps, and most encoders/decoders can't handle that high of a bitrate.

The issue is not the visual quality. It is good enough for me. The issue is the latency. It is too slow for most of my games, which basically makes it unusable. There should not be any reason why my speed is capped like this.

Note Latency and Bandwiddth are 2 entirely different things

Bandwidth - How big the pipe is
Latency - How long it takes for something from point A to reach point B

Think of a garden hose where

Bandwidth - how much water comes out the other end
Latency - how long it takes from when you turn on the faucet to when the water comes out the other end

If the hose is just regular water, the bandwidth might not be great (size of the hose) but the latency is good (when i turn on the faucet water comes out the other end fast)

But say that faucet had molasses coming out. Sure I could have a giant 1 ft wide hose (lots of bandwidth) but the latency is gonna suck because the molasses takes a LONG time to travel from the faucet to the end of the hose (terrible latency)

Satellite communcations are a good example of this. Sure you can have a 200mbps satellite connection, but the latency could be 5 seconds.

[Davidoff]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Originally posted by WrathOfSammy:

The issue is not the visual quality. It is good enough for me. The issue is the latency. It is too slow for most of my games, which basically makes it unusable. There should not be any reason why my speed is capped like this.

Note Latency and Bandwiddth are 2 entirely different things

Bandwidth - How big the pipe is
Latency - How long it takes for something from point A to reach point B

Think of a garden hose where

Bandwidth - how much water comes out the other end
Latency - how long it takes from when you turn on the faucet to when the water comes out the other end

If the hose is just regular water, the bandwidth might not be great (size of the hose) but the latency is good (when i turn on the faucet water comes out the other end fast)

But say that faucet had molasses coming out. Sure I could have a giant 1 ft wide hose (lots of bandwidth) but the latency is gonna suck because the molasses takes a LONG time to travel from the faucet to the end of the hose (terrible latency)

Satellite communcations are a good example of this. Sure you can have a 200mbps satellite connection, but the latency could be 5 seconds.

In regular networking you would be right but for game streaming the bandwidth is mostly there as a quality parameter. The higher bandwidth stream, the higher picture quality but since we're doing it all in real time that extra data adds on encode/decode time ie increasing latency.

[WrathOfSammy]

None of this explains why my speed is capped at 100Mbps even though I have a gigabit wired network.

Your example is incomplete because what appears to be the problem is that my faucet isn't being turned on all the way. It's only 10% on.

[Davidoff]

Originally posted by WrathOfSammy:

None of this explains why my speed is capped at 100Mbps even though I have a gigabit wired network.

Your example is incomplete because what appears to be the problem is that my faucet isn't being turned on all the way. It's only 10% on.

Steam Link streaming is capped at 100Mbps. You can find the bandwidth limit in the steam link app settings. My ATV4 only lets me select up to 50Mbps and then unlimited (which in practice is 100).

[WrathOfSammy]

Originally posted by Davidoff:

Steam Link streaming is capped at 100Mbps. You can find the bandwidth limit in the steam link app settings. My ATV4 only lets me select up to 50Mbps and then unlimited (which in practice is 100).

Any idea why?

I don't know why tech support didn't tell me this when I asked them about it.

[JlnPrssnr]

Refer to answer one in this thread, Slouken is literally the dev of Steam Link and he already gave the answer to your question

[WrathOfSammy]

Originally posted by JlnPrssnr:

Refer to answer one in this thread, Slouken is literally the dev of Steam Link and he already gave the answer to your question

Read it again. He didn't answer whether the speed was capped at 100Mbps. He addressed the visual quality above 100Mbps, which isn't what I was asking about, and you will see from my reply that it didn't answer my question.

[Joulupukki3000]

I have same problem. Connection speed limits to 100 Mpbs. Connection speed set up from app to limitless. I tested connection speed from my Shield TV with iperf3 to my computer. Almost 1 Gbps both ways up and down.

[Joulupukki3000]

I like to play in 4K in my living room TV. Should ditch Steam Link and get HDMI cable from my computer to living room TV?

[Davidoff]

Originally posted by Joulupukki3000:

I have same problem. Connection speed limits to 100 Mpbs. Connection speed set up from app to limitless. I tested connection speed from my Shield TV with iperf3 to my computer. Almost 1 Gbps both ways up and down.

Whatever the problem is, bandwidth limit ain't it.