Steam Link Better than Remote Play, How to match experience?

[Flammington]

So I've moved my PC to the back room plugged into my internet router and plan to stream all my games to the various screens across the house.

The Steam Link Apps on my TV and Phone work great, hardly any stuttering and latency is good enough to play, however when playing from my Mac using remote play, it's significantly worse. It's laggier, buggier, sometimes my steam controller doesn't work, sometimes it does, sometimes just the 'a' button doesn't work, sometimes it has trouble switching to the game screen and I'm left on the desktop (Doesn't automatically go big picture mode like Steam Link does)

Basically I'm asking if there is a way through settings or what not, to match the experience using remote play to that of Steam Link? Ideally I'd just like a steam link app on the mac, but that doesn't exist as far as I know.

[The Past Future King]

I can't help you with everything (jumped on the forum today to post about Mac remote-play issues), but I can help you with some stuff.

I use a wired xbox 360 controller and a 2012 MacBook Pro without a dedicated GPU. To get the controller to work on my Mac I had to install a freeware driver. Sometimes a game doesn't register the controller correctly, most commonly on older games. To create the most consist experience I've found using Big Picture Mode helps. My MacBook struggles with it, so I turn it on on the host and use desktop for the MacBook. At the very least, I wasn't able to use the guide button to bring up an overlay without doing this. The setting for using a BPM overlay in desktop mode with a steam-input controller isn't available on the Mac (not sure why)

After that, if you're still having issues, you may need to:
- Go into the games settings, look for a controller setting and switch it from keyboard to controller
- unplug the mouse from your host machine
- disable steam configuration for that game

Regarding latency, turn off location services in System Prefs>Security>Privacy>Location. This is the biggest cause of ping spikes. I also disabled most iCloud syncing services for good measure.

To deal with the occasional bump to my host's desktop, I created a custom config for my controller that Windows+Tabs to get me back into the game if I run into the issue (I have)

With all this, I still have a few problems:
- Hardware Decode produces an image a few pixels too narrow (1072 instead of 1080)
- I get small ping spikes (15-30 ms) which cause the iGPI to lag far past the point of the spike, resulting in inefficient handling and dropped frames. On the latency chart I get a right triangular pattern, where the peak lines up with the ping spike and the slope down is it returning to normal speed after several seconds before popping up again. Uncertain if this is normal GPU behavior, the decoding is causing ping latency or vice versa
- There's no option to use the BPM overlay with a steam input controller in desktop mode in Mac, where the option exists in windows.

I've never used a steam link, but I'd be curious to know how consistent my experience is with yours.

[Flammington]

Originally posted by The Past Future King:

I can't help you with everything (jumped on the forum today to post about Mac remote-play issues), but I can help you with some stuff.

I use a wired xbox 360 controller and a 2012 MacBook Pro without a dedicated GPU. To get the controller to work on my Mac I had to install a freeware driver. Sometimes a game doesn't register the controller correctly, most commonly on older games. To create the most consist experience I've found using Big Picture Mode helps. My MacBook struggles with it, so I turn it on on the host and use desktop for the MacBook. At the very least, I wasn't able to use the guide button to bring up an overlay without doing this. The setting for using a BPM overlay in desktop mode with a steam-input controller isn't available on the Mac (not sure why)

After that, if you're still having issues, you may need to:
- Go into the games settings, look for a controller setting and switch it from keyboard to controller
- unplug the mouse from your host machine
- disable steam configuration for that game

Regarding latency, turn off location services in System Prefs>Security>Privacy>Location. This is the biggest cause of ping spikes. I also disabled most iCloud syncing services for good measure.

To deal with the occasional bump to my host's desktop, I created a custom config for my controller that Windows+Tabs to get me back into the game if I run into the issue (I have)

With all this, I still have a few problems:
- Hardware Decode produces an image a few pixels too narrow (1072 instead of 1080)
- I get small ping spikes (15-30 ms) which cause the iGPI to lag far past the point of the spike, resulting in inefficient handling and dropped frames. On the latency chart I get a right triangular pattern, where the peak lines up with the ping spike and the slope down is it returning to normal speed after several seconds before popping up again. Uncertain if this is normal GPU behavior, the decoding is causing ping latency or vice versa
- There's no option to use the BPM overlay with a steam input controller in desktop mode in Mac, where the option exists in windows.

I've never used a steam link, but I'd be curious to know how consistent my experience is with yours.

Yeah, I've found having big picture mode on the host PC works well. I still occaisonally have issues where the controller isn't registered, but I just restart it a couple times and eventually it does work. I have a feeling it's something to do with the game not being the active window somehow.
I've played around with the settings and have gotten it to a place where it works really well. I pretty much just enabled everything. Occasionally it'll stutter for a couple seconds, but while playing I hardly notice any compression or lag at all.

[The Past Future King]

Originally posted by Mattcus Flammington:

Originally posted by The Past Future King:

I can't help you with everything (jumped on the forum today to post about Mac remote-play issues), but I can help you with some stuff.

I use a wired xbox 360 controller and a 2012 MacBook Pro without a dedicated GPU. To get the controller to work on my Mac I had to install a freeware driver. Sometimes a game doesn't register the controller correctly, most commonly on older games. To create the most consist experience I've found using Big Picture Mode helps. My MacBook struggles with it, so I turn it on on the host and use desktop for the MacBook. At the very least, I wasn't able to use the guide button to bring up an overlay without doing this. The setting for using a BPM overlay in desktop mode with a steam-input controller isn't available on the Mac (not sure why)

After that, if you're still having issues, you may need to:
- Go into the games settings, look for a controller setting and switch it from keyboard to controller
- unplug the mouse from your host machine
- disable steam configuration for that game

Regarding latency, turn off location services in System Prefs>Security>Privacy>Location. This is the biggest cause of ping spikes. I also disabled most iCloud syncing services for good measure.

To deal with the occasional bump to my host's desktop, I created a custom config for my controller that Windows+Tabs to get me back into the game if I run into the issue (I have)

With all this, I still have a few problems:
- Hardware Decode produces an image a few pixels too narrow (1072 instead of 1080)
- I get small ping spikes (15-30 ms) which cause the iGPI to lag far past the point of the spike, resulting in inefficient handling and dropped frames. On the latency chart I get a right triangular pattern, where the peak lines up with the ping spike and the slope down is it returning to normal speed after several seconds before popping up again. Uncertain if this is normal GPU behavior, the decoding is causing ping latency or vice versa
- There's no option to use the BPM overlay with a steam input controller in desktop mode in Mac, where the option exists in windows.

I've never used a steam link, but I'd be curious to know how consistent my experience is with yours.

Yeah, I've found having big picture mode on the host PC works well. I still occaisonally have issues where the controller isn't registered, but I just restart it a couple times and eventually it does work. I have a feeling it's something to do with the game not being the active window somehow.
I've played around with the settings and have gotten it to a place where it works really well. I pretty much just enabled everything. Occasionally it'll stutter for a couple seconds, but while playing I hardly notice any compression or lag at all.

Hey man, I solved my lag issues! In addition to disabling location services, disabling iCloud services entirely made my lag spikes disappear. I just signed out of the Mac altogether. the fact that the decoder takes as long as it does to snap back is still strange, but without the spikes to cause it, it runs at an average latency that's super low. I got a real steam link, and compared the charts. While the SL decoder moved in sync with network latency better than the Mac did, it's minimum latency seemed to be higher by ~10-15ms. The way that it functions compared to remote play gave me a few insights into how to further improve compatibility: for games that have trouble with controller recognition, turn off steam input for the game on the host machine , not the client. If you don't want to go to the host machine, the host settings will come up in the steam overlay in-game. The remote play session doesn't use local in-game settings. This resolved controller recognition for me in almost all instances.

The only outstanding issues that I have are the resolution issue when using hardware decoding, which I believe may be a steam beta issue. So I'm just using software decode with great results. I'll share some performance charts tomorrow when I can get the photos

I now have my macbook set up as a dedicated steam machine running in closed lid mode. I created an automator app to wake the host PC over LAN and added it to the client steam game list, and a script to shut down the PC on the host steam game list. I added a sleep shortcut to the desktop controller config, along with a macro to open and close a safari window that goes to streaming sites not currently available on my roku. Lastly, I restarted the Mac while the lid closed and my tv connected so that it would only recognize 1 screen and lower resources used on a second display.

With things going as well as they are, I'm going to try using BPM on the Mac and see how it fares. The GPU spikes up but I'm not using it for decoding anyway.

with lower latency, access to others apps and services, and the ability to easily script functionalities in the MacBook and map them to the controller and/or stream as apps, I feel that my 2012 Mac outperforms the steam link significantly, with the only losses being the slick UI, smaller profile and heat management. I'm

[「Schwipsy」]

Dude! I was just having issues with my macbook, i might check this out!