Would a gigabit switch vastly improve my streaming experience?

[CEXMONSTER]

I've been debating whether or not to get a gigabit switch so the lan transfer speed would be a lot faster than my 100mbps ports. Could anyone perhaps share their experience with using gigabit ports? and also if it can help play at higher resolutions as currently, I cannot stream 1080p to my host which I found baffling as my host PC was fairly good.. a 4790k 4.4ghz and a 950. On the client side however, is a 3258 and a gt 610. I bought the gt 610 yesterday hoping the gpu encoding would be better than software encoding as stated in here {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo} the 610 does support h264 encoding. probably was a waste. Could my lan speed be the bottleneck here? would using a gigabit port improve my resolution? Any help is appreciated thank you

[VRtopian]

1gb ports make a big difference.

At 1 gigabit you can transfer over the network faster then SATA2 hard disks, so if you have to do any big moves then you have them fly along at 70+ megabytes per second, as opposed to 11 megabytes per second.

Even just for home use, it's super-handy to have - but - only if you're going to be using physically wired computers with it. Although, 802.11n can sync faster then 100mbit, so to remove a bottleneck there you'd want 1 gigabit ports.

Believe it or not I actually stream from my high end gaming PC to my Alienware Alpha box via wireless but I am getting close to 1gb and I have absolutely no issues with lag or quality. I have full resolution.

[CEXMONSTER]

thank you so much! If i were to get gigabit lan speed, would my client pc be able to stream at 1080p you think? because right now, I'm only able to stream 1366x768 which looks horrid.

[VRtopian]

Well, I cannot speak to your system and specs but I am streaming in 2560x1440 and it looks amazing on my 65" 4K.

[CEXMONSTER]

I have one question, do I have to connect my cat5e cables to gigabit cards? or is the motherboard port okay?

[VRtopian]

That entirely depends on your motherboard. If it is rated for gigabit or 100. 10/100/1000 is how they are sometimes shown. If you do not show the 1000 or if it does not specify gigabit then you are most likely not gigabit rated. Check with the MOBO manufacturer if you still have doubts. Most newer MOBO have gigabit ports.

[kreiselhoschi]

You´re seriously messing things up, buddy.^^
First of all: 100Mbit/s is sufficient for streaming even 4k content. A GigE-Switch only would help if you have high load on your network like multiple people streaming UHD content simultaniously. Even if you set bandwith to "unlimited" it shouldn´t exceed 80Mbit/s because that´s where Valve throttled the Steam Link with it´s 100Mbit NIC.

Secondly: using a GT610 on the client side has nothing to do with ENconding, but with DEcoding. Having 1GB RAM, 64bit memory interface I´d personally say that it´s an entry level GPU that isn´t capable of properly decoding a FHD stream with maxed details and 30Mbit/s. Yes, on the paper it can decode BluRay, but that´s not a pleasant experience. So your options are to

- lower the encoding bitrate
- lower the resolution
- lower the details

I´d suggest you try setting resolution to 720p and then tinker around with the other setting.

In addition, the 950 in your host clearly is a bottleneck, too. While it can run older games in FHD w/o problems, for newer titles you will need to live with less detail level and / or less resolution. If the 950 is throtteling, you of course will not have a flawless stream.

Sorry for not having better news for you.

[CEXMONSTER]

whelpp I just bought a gigabit switch :c thank you for the information though! what if the client has a 750ti? Would that be much better?

[VmAn]

Yes

[ReBoot]

I run Steam IHS over a 100 mbit connection in 1080p in high quality. As such, I am very sure gigabit doesn't change much.