Unplayable flicker. Nvidia shield gamestream with Big Picture Steam

[MatthewMeeple]

After latest Steam client update, my screen is flickering when I run any Steam game in Big Picture mode via Nvidia Shield Gamestream to my TV.

No flickering occurs with Steam itself on my PC, nor with the Nvidia Sheild by itself. Only with both combined.

[GENIE360]

Same issue here. I've changed every setting I can think of with no luck. I think it's deffinately something to do with big picture as the image that is flickering through the games appears to be the dark blue big picture background. This issue is only with steam games too. Origin games work fine with nvidia gamestream.

[herculeesjr]

I FIGURED IT OUT!
Open NVIDIA Control Panel - go to 3D Settings - Manage 3D Settings - Program Settings tab
This is where you set what GPU applications can use (either Intel iGPU or nVidia card).
One at a time add these to the list (Add button - Browse button) and set them to Integrated Graphics:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\GameOverlayUI.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamerrorreporter.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamerrorreporter64.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\streaming_client.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\uninstall.exe

Now no more random flickering of the Steam Big Picture blue background while in games. I bet not all of those need to be set to be forced to integrated graphics, like the error reporter and uninstaller, I just got tired of troubleshooting this and did it to every exe in the root folder of Steam, and now it's fixed.
The issue reminded me of how in games when there's two different objects at the exact same coordinates in world they will flicker back and forth because the game engine doesn't know which one should be visible. So I figured both Steam and the game were having a similar issue and forced Steam to never run on the nVidia GPU. Surprisingly it doesn't seem to cause any issues with Steam, and still fixes the game.

[Luz]

Man thank you herculeesjr for this comment. I was looking for a while until google lead me to your comment. Worked well

[REAPER]

Nice

[Kauczu]

It seems to be a problem with Nvidia hardware encoding. NGE use it natively, but Steam has implemented this function on their client. As most games are related from Steam, NGE opens Steam, next Steam opens game, but they want to access Nvidia hardware encoding exclusively. And that is the time where flickering begins.

My orkaround:
Firstly!
If you changed any settings on NVIDIA Control Panel (3D Settings/Manage 3D Settings/Program Settings tab) as written above, then you should revert it back to default!
Pointing Steam executables to Integrated Graphics will significantly degrade performance on most games!

next:
- If you want to stream game over Nvidia GameStream (I assume that every Shield owner want this)
At host Steam app to turn off Nvidia hardware encoding.
To do that go to Steam > Settings > In-home Streaming > Advanced host options and unthick "Enable hardware encoding on NVIDIA GPU"
- If you play only via Steam link
You should remove useless NGE app ;) and enable nvidia gpu hardware encoding at Steam app.

[76561198958600324]

add me

[lentinoz]

None of the above helped me. My workaround is to not use big picture and just launch the game directly from the desktop or normal steam.

The flickering we see is your screen switching between the game and big picture. The kicker is, you need to turn off any controller settings in steam. If you don't, steam will automatically launch a version of big picture to handle your controller preferences. This isn't perfect, but it at least works.

If anyone solves the issue permanently without compromising your steam controller layouts, please let us know.

[0211]

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[0211]

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[Kargath]

I have the same problem with a new laptop that has both Intel integrated graphics and an NVIDIA RTX 2060. The suggestions here didn't help. There's no flicker when streaming from a desktop PC that has only an NVIDIA GPU and no integrated graphics. I tried Steam Link with the laptop and there's no flicker but it stutters. Is there a proper solution for this?

[Asmodelta]

The above fixes didn't do it for my SO's laptop, but we found a workaround. Plugging her laptop to another monitor, closing the laptop lid to force the computer to use only that monitor and THEN using gamestream fixed any flickering. Hope this comment helps others in the future.

P.S: Don't forget to change the battery saving options so that the laptop "Does nothing" when you close the lid.