is there a way to not lag so much in steam remote play

[flardpwr]

so i was playing with a friend from spain and i was totally winning (sarcasm i lost everything) every round due to how laggy i was, i tried using a VPN set to france and while it did help a bit i still lagged a lot. I know that this is probably since theyre all the way over in europe meanwhile im in America but is there any way or is there a remedy to make my experience better in remote play? or any VPN anyone has tried that has given good results with steam remote play?

[Ben Lubar]

Funny coincidence, the only person I've used Steam Remote Play Together with is also in Spain.

Problem is, the speed of light just isn't fast enough. To run a game at 60 FPS with 2 frame latency, the data has 50 milliseconds to make its way from one computer to the screen of another computer across the planet.

In 50 milliseconds, light (or electricity or data) can travel about 15000 kilometers in a straight line through a vacuum. That's about twice as far as it is from my house to Spain. Problem is, the data isn't traveling in a straight line. There's not a cable directly connecting your computer to your friend's computer. A bunch of other computers in between need to figure out where to forward that data to, and the data isn't moving while they do that.

There are a few things you can try, but for the most part the answer is a very unhelpful "reduce the physical distance between the two computers".

If you have a significantly better internet connection than your friend, you could try hosting instead of them. The amount of data that needs to be sent by the player sharing their screen is much more than the amount of data sent by the player sharing their controller.

Another (probably very unhelpful) suggestion would be to play a game where latency matters less, or a game where the graphics are rendered locally and only the data is transmitted (AKA not using Steam Remote Play Together)

[nullable]

Yeah that darn speed of light is impossibly fast, until it isn't.

[smokerob79]

its not the speed of light that is the problem its the number of connections.....

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by smokerob79:

its not the speed of light that is the problem its the number of connections.....

The speed of light is actually a limit on how fast information (as in, the physics definition of "information") can travel. Even with a single dedicated direct wired connection between my house and my Spanish friend's house, it's impossible to show them the same thing that's on my screen at 60Hz (assuming no artificial delay on my end). It takes more than "one frame" for information to get from where I physically am to where they physically are regardless of transmission method.

Having the internet work via routers rather than a single wire going to each computer you want to talk to just means the information has to travel along a very roundabout path - like how your digestive system doesn't send food straight down from your mouth to the other end, but with vastly more twists and turns.