300mbps bandwidth forced 1080p crappy quality

[Caius]

Hi, I would hugely appreciate any help/expertise you guys would be so kind to give/share. I am completely stuck after a full day of trying to tinker with this.

I've a 4k 2in1 laptop and a 1080p gaming laptop. I've plopped an ethernet cable in between the two, and I reach 300mbps bandwidth usage in streaming 1080p from the gaming laptop to the small laptop. The streaming is set on beautiful, bandwidth on unlimited, and resolution force on 1080p.

I've tried everything. Set the small laptop screen to 1080p to match the gaming laptop, DSR (upscaled) 4k'd my gaming laptop with my 2in1's 4k resolution (although there is no steam option to stream 4k in my settings), etc.

The display lag is minimal; doesn't go above 20ms. It overall works very well in gameplay, but the whole thing just looks washed out. Stuff looks blurry; barely anything like on the gaming laptop's screen.

Is there a bandwidth bottleneck that's happening here? My small laptop is using a USB3 ethernet adapter, but with 'LAN Speed Test' I have a writing speed of 315 mbps and reading speed of 626 mbps.

Is there anything I can do? Or is steam streaming/any kind of streaming meant to downgrade visual quality considerably?

[kreiselhoschi]

Since you don´t give any details on your hardware and used enocder, it´s hard to tell...
I´d assume that unlimited bandwidth is part of the problem. 30Mbit/s should be sufficient setting for 1080p (Netflix is using 6Mbit/s^^). Other thing to try is tinkering with the encoder options in host options.

[spayced]

It’s not clear to me, you plugged them directly to each other to create an ad-hoc network? Is there a reason you did not plug them into your router?

[Caius]

Apologies; the gaming laptop has an i7 7700HQ and 1070 GPU, while the notebook has an i7 8550U. I forced the ethernet network of both devices onto gigabyte duplex too.

And I do not have a router available, sadly. So I've had to create a direct server. It works just fine with Moonlight, so I don't see why Steam seems to be derping out as often. Moonlight has worked even with another friend's gaming laptop.

[Caius]

Routers help with streaming stability? I get 940mb/s speeds in between the two laptops, so there doesn't seem to be any bandwidth bottlenecking. But could streaming be made better with a router? Why would just direct ethernet hurt speeds? Modern laptops are more than capable of handling ethernet to ethernet.

[spayced]

Well the network card has to work harder because it is doing more work, but I am not sure if it would be that bad.

Can you run the diagnostics overlay while streaming? This may help diagnose. It shows a stacked line of what is contributing latency.

[kreiselhoschi]

I still strongly believe that "unlimited bandwidth" is causing the problem... *hint*