Streaming started to glitch yesterday

[onehalf83]

Background

I was using this setup for almost a year now. Sometimes I stream games from my PC (i5, 16GB RAM, GTX 1080, connected via LAN) to MacBook Pro 2015 (i7, Radeon M370X, connected via wifi to 300 Mbps router).

Streaming settings:

Host: Hardware encoding turned on, Network prioritization turned off
Client: Hardware decoding turned off, Balanced mode

It always was working fine, sometimes there were some glitches, but they were rare like 1-2 times per hour, and it was just either short 1 second freeze or just blurred picture. I normally played slow paced strategies, including Civilization 6 since the moment of the release and everything was playable the way I totally forgot I was streaming from 1 computer to another.

Problem

However yesterday, when I tried to play Civilization 6 exactly same way as I did before, glitches become super-lengthy, like 5-15 seconds and started to appear once per 3-5 minutes, which makes playing it this way quite annoying.

What I checked

• I enabled streaming debug where it shows streaming stats and graph at the bottom of the screen. What I found that during the glitches is that encoding performance is pretty stable but network + decoding graph would spike significantly (I think it means that bottleneck is network and decoding latency just depends on it).
  
• I also turned on constant ping from my client Mac to Wifi router. When there are no glitches ping latency is 1-4ms with rare occasional spikes to 20-40ms. When streaming starts to glitch, ping latency would jump to hundreds of ms or just time out during duration of whole glitch
  
• If I do any other kind of streaming over wifi, like HD youtube video, there is no such issue
  
• Checked that there is no another activities over network that could put significant workload on the router except streaming itself

So it looks like it just bloats network with a stream at some point causing this spike so that wifi connection literally dies for seconds.

What I tried to change

I tried various things to see if it will help, but none of them actually improved anything, so I reverted back to original settings

• Rebooted client, host and router several times
  
• Changed wifi channels on router
  
• Turned on network priority on the host
  
• Turned on hardware decoding on the client
  
• Put MacBook directly in front of the router to see if there is anything could interfere in between
  
• limited network bandwidth to 5 Mbps

Additional notes

• I'm unlikely to test streaming to this Mac over the Ethernet instead of wifi. First it wouldn't be easy to do in my current setup, and second - it would just kill the point of such streaming for me completely - so I really want to make it work over wifi as it was before.
  
• There are some new drivers from Nvidia (I installed previous ones 1-2 weeks ago) for my host machine - I'm going to install and see if it changes anything, but I'm sceptical as encoding performance is good and stable
  
• I didn't record streaming debug logs, only looked at debug information in real-time - not sure if they can provide more insights, but I'll try
  
• Few days ago, when Civ 6 was just released I did have similar glitch when I ran it, but I rebooted wifi router and it resolved a problem for next few days until I started to get these glitches yesterday
  
• So it could be that router is dying, but it is couple of years old and I'm not sure how to confirm that 100%. So far it looks like it is only Steam IHS related and I cannot reproduce it any other way

I'm open for any suggestions as I'm really eager to fix this and keep playing as I did before.

[kreiselhoschi]

Nvidia driver updated yesterday?

[onehalf83]

Originally posted by kreiselhoschi:

Nvidia driver updated yesterday?

I didn't update most recent driver yesterday, but plan to install it today to see if it changes anything. I have the one installed that they released couple of weeks ago, but after that it was working fine and only broke yesterday, so not sure if it is driver related.