Steam Remote Together - Extreme lag?

[Dawidsen]

Hello,

I was really enjoying this feature, since my friend hosted a few games and we could play together.

Since a few days it is not possible to play, because the lag is so extreme, that it stutters (video and sound) and it looks like a slideshow.

Our Internet connections are powerful enough and we even checked in speed tests, if everything is alright. It does not even happen on Steam streams, but only on Remote Together.

I have tried to open it with a lower resolution, but it is still the exactly same thing.

Is there a trick or something I missed? How can I make it fluent again, so it is possible to play again?

I would be thankful for any hint!

[Jack Schitt]

It might possibly be the connection between you and the friend is poor quality. Even if they're in the same room a connection between 2 computers travels very far distances it doesn't just go straight across the room to the other computer and back over the internet.

There's not a single thing anyone can do about that if that's the reason it's laggy.

A speed test tests your connection quality and speed. It doesn't test the connection quality and speed between you and someone else.

Open a command prompt or PowerShell:
1. Web search "What's my IP?" and share your IP's with each other.
2. type: ping <friends IP>
- The "ms" result is your ping to friend. No need to know what the other info is.
3. type: tracert <friends IP>
- This traces the route (path) the connection is taking to get to friend's computer. Each listing (line it produces) is called a HOP which is a different internet tower or hub the connection is passing through on it's way to the destination (friend's IP). It will show a ping (ms) for each HOP.

- The fewer the amount of lines it produces until it finishes the better. The ping it reports is also important (higher = worse).

That will evaluate your connections to each other. There is absolutely ZERO anyone anywhere can do about it. I shared this info to show how to test connections to a specific location. We, consumers, do not have any control over how our connections are routed through HOPs. This is a way to test it so we know where the problem is. It's not a solution.

The only real solution if it is a bad connection due to distance between you and friend is for you both to find a server for that game between your locations and join that server to play.

Another factor that might be the cause or part of the cause is the capability of friends computer. At the same time they are:
- Running a game
- Hosting a server for that game
- Sharing it with you
- Playing the game
- Hosting your connection to it

That's quite a bit of demand. It's possible the reason it's slow and lags is actually multiple things.

What game is it?

[Dawidsen]

Thank you very much for your answer. I will try to get into the problem more in detail with your informations. For now I can tell you that we checked the ping in cmd. It is about 120ms.

I can confirm that when we play normal games with this latency, there was never a serious problem. There is also no problem when we watch our Streams in Steam. It only happens on Steam Together since a few days.

We tried it on many games, like simple 2D Tetris or even 3D high graphic games. Before everything worked fine, but now even the simplest low resolution picture, is extreme laggy.

The cutting off is constantly going on. There are no "better and worse" parts when playing.

I try to look through the options for now and for the issue.

Thank you again for your comment.

[Jack Schitt]

120 isn't great but it's not horrible either. That's well playable so it's probably not your connections.

Has the person hosting and sharing the game checked their hard drive's health? Another one of the too much to list things it could be is fragmentation or a ton of empty space on a large storage drive that isn't partitioned.

Files aren't stored in one big clump on a hard drive. One file might have thousands or even millions of parts to it that are spread out all over the space it's placed in. Storage space is divided up in to a ton of tiny sections called Sectors. The pieces of files and data are placed randomly in to the sectors like The Muppets Swedish Chef gracefully places things in a highly organized fashion.

When there's a lot of empty space it takes longer to get to what we're after. Same with if a storage space is drastically fragmented - it has to go threw all that stuff spewed everywhere to find and get what it's after then it has to collect it, put all the pieces it's found together, and send it.

Other things to try:

Verify Game File Integrity.

Have the host check their fragmentation. I recommend Defraggler[www.ccleaner.com]. The Windows defrag utility does the same thing but it's not as informative. Defraggler also has features the Windows thing doesn't like being able to defragment specific files individually.

Check anti-virus on both computers. Insure security programs aren't causing the lag. Create exceptions / exclusions so your anti-virus doesn't scan and interrupt the game and it's files. If you don't know how there are usually instructions on how to do that on the website for the security suite you have.