40-70% Frame Loss

[Alpha7]

Okay,

Host PC is my Laptop:
AMD A6-4400m APU @ 2.7Ghz
ATI 7520G
Win 7 64

Client (work pc)
AMD X2 1.9Ghz
Radeon 9200
Win XP 32

Messing with the setting, running @ 30fps on 480p on most games I get 40%ish frame loss. If i put the client on auto or @ 60fps it will generally get 70% or so packet loss. Now the client is a crappy computer, I use it ever day but it CAN run a lot of the games I am testing (X-Com TFTD, X-COM UFO Defense, World of Goo, Super Crate Box and primarily Peggle and Peggle Nights).

It is running on LAN and the two PCs are actually connected via a hub (and they are right next to each other, again this is testing).

The latency is usually stable between 0 and 100ms which at home on my good PCs that is completely playable.

What I don't necessarily get is if the host PC is able to play and encode the game and still keep the frame rate up and CPU//GPU usage relatively low. The client can normally play the game but instead just needs to receive the video then what is the problem?

With the XCOM games I even get 0 latency, 0 packet loss and they only run at like 640x480 but still get almost 40% frame loss.

Tried leaving other settings on auto and also tried the disable hardware encoding but it doesn't improve anything.

[HeikkiH]

Alpha7. You will find some info about streaming if you look to streaming_log.txt which can be found from Steam/logs folder in the host system. There you can see if the problem is on the host side (capture, encode) or network or on the client side (decode, display)

[Alpha7]

I didn't include it because (as far as I can tell) it is pretty much worthless.

I didn't see anything too unusual in the log but here it is, maybe someone can get something out of it.

Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Server available at address: 172.16.2.64:27031
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Connecting to server at address: 172.16.2.64:27031
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Session state Idle -> Connecting
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Couldn't load Qwave.dll, QoS disabled
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Session state Connecting -> Authenticating
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlAuthenticationResponse
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Session state Authenticating -> Negotiating
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlNegotiationInit
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlNegotiationSetConfig
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Session state Negotiating -> StreamStarting
Thu Feb 06 15:10:20 2014 UTC - Session state StreamStarting -> Streaming
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTargetFramerate
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Targeting 60 FPS
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTitle
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTitle
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetIcon
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursorImage
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursorImage
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursorImage
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlStartVideoData
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Video size: 640x300, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - libavcodec software decoding with 1 thread
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Video size: 640x300, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:10:21 2014 UTC - Video size: 640x300, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlStartAudioData
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Couldn't open audio device, audio is disabled: XAudio2: Couldn't create mastering voice
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetIcon
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlHideCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTargetFramerate
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Targeting 30 FPS
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - libav info: Reinit context to 640x480, pix_fmt: 0
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Video size: 640x480, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTargetFramerate
Thu Feb 06 15:10:22 2014 UTC - Targeting 30 FPS
Thu Feb 06 15:10:30 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTargetFramerate
Thu Feb 06 15:10:30 2014 UTC - Targeting 30 FPS
Thu Feb 06 15:10:31 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTargetFramerate
Thu Feb 06 15:10:31 2014 UTC - Targeting 30 FPS
Thu Feb 06 15:11:02 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetIcon
Thu Feb 06 15:11:02 2014 UTC - libav info: Reinit context to 1600x880, pix_fmt: 0
Thu Feb 06 15:11:02 2014 UTC - Video size: 1594x872, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:11:02 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlShowCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:11:02 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:11:02 2014 UTC - libav info: Reinit context to 672x432, pix_fmt: 0
Thu Feb 06 15:11:03 2014 UTC - Video size: 658x418, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:11:03 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursor
Thu Feb 06 15:11:03 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetCursorImage
Thu Feb 06 15:11:03 2014 UTC - libav info: Reinit context to 640x304, pix_fmt: 0
Thu Feb 06 15:11:03 2014 UTC - Video size: 640x300, window size: 1680x1050
Thu Feb 06 15:11:03 2014 UTC - Got control packet k_EStreamControlSetTitle
Thu Feb 06 15:11:05 2014 UTC - Session state Streaming -> StreamStopping
Thu Feb 06 15:11:05 2014 UTC - Session state StreamStopping -> Idle

[HeikkiH]

Are you sure that that is from streaming_log.txt from the host? (not client) There should be average and standard deviations in milliseconds of capture, encode, network, decode and display.

[fearlessfrog]

A quick way to see where the issue might be is to interpret the graph. Run for a bit with the F6 graph showing, and then use this:

"You can tell by looking at the stats graph - below the blue line is encoding, between the blue lines is network and above the blue line is decoding"

I'd suspect you're going to see a red line way up above the blue one, indicating the issue is with decoding the client, which at least narrows it down.