Steam in-home streaming artifacts with hardware encoding

[P90N00B]

Hi all, I've been experiencing weird artifacts when I turn on hardware encoding in steam's in-home streaming. They are not minor compression artifacts but large distortion of the images with gradients of green throughout the screen. I am using a sapphire R9 290 on the host and and old laptop with HD 2600. I have tried with and without steam beta but experiences the same thing. It works perfectly without hardware encoding. Do I need to install anything for VCE to work on the host?

[kreiselhoschi]

Install an Nvidia card (Kepler and above). AMD cards are not as good when it comes to encoding the stream.

[DJ0Ux]

Lmao i have a R9 290X (slighty better than R9 290...) and it works juste fine. I can play all my games at 60fps 1920x1200 on my Macbook thanks to that and i can't even tell weither it's a stream or not because the image is just perfect.

I don't know about your problem, but saying that AMD cards are not good for stream is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

[P90N00B]

Hi Is "accelerated video transcoding" required while installing drivers for hardware encoding to work in steam?

[P90N00B]

Or do I need to install anything for VCE to work?

[kreiselhoschi]

Originally posted by Ozmoz:

I don't know about your problem, but saying that AMD cards are not good for stream is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

I didn´t say that AMD cards are not good for IHS... read and understand! I DID say that HW encoding works better with Nvidia cards. Sorry for offending you, but that´s a fact.

By the way: I don´t care if Nvidia or AMD has the better cards - just my personal experience... and if you read through the forums, you´ll come to a similar conclusion. Have a nice day.

[Elettrone]

Sadly for you this issue is not confined to your specific hardware setup.
I have the same issue streaming from Win to Mac and it's a lot worse when i do Hardware enc-dec and i use an nVidia to do encode.
They are never gonna fix all the variables imho...a lot of wasted potential this inhome streaming unless you have the magical hardware/OS combination.
If it can help you the most compatible tresults are obtained with software enc/dec and using bitrates below or equal to 10mbits.
Windows is less susceptible to this issue but it is still present.

VALVE COME ON MAN UP AND FIX YOUR DAMN BUGGY SOFTWARE!

[yayuuu]

Can you show us screenshot of these artifacts? I've spent a lot of time configuring SIHS, so I might be able to help you with the config. Also try to do screenshot showing your stats (latency graph, FPS, resolution, encoder, decoder, bandwidth etc.)

[KillahBee]

The encoder for me is a 760 and the decoder is a 5750.
With both having hardware encoding unchecked everything runs perfectly.
When I enable hardware encoding on the host than the artifacts start.
I have a 250gts that I can try for the client machine, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Oh and game is shadow of mordor.

[Elettrone]

Originally posted by yayuuu:

Can you show us screenshot of these artifacts? I've spent a lot of time configuring SIHS, so I might be able to help you with the config. Also try to do screenshot showing your stats (latency graph, FPS, resolution, encoder, decoder, bandwidth etc.)

The same artifacts every mac user has when enabling hardware encode man...white and green smearing piling uo over time till you refresh the screen or change to a completely different image.
My setup is fine i'm pretty confident.

This is the link to my original post: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/1/522730700441015948/

There are a couple of shots if you scroll down a bit in the replies.

[KillahBee]

Ok the artifacting disapears if I keep my host and client the same resolution.
When I was getting artifacts host was 1080p and client was 720p, now both are 1080 and are running fine.

[Elettrone]

Do you mean desktop resolution?

[KillahBee]

Game resolution, you can set it in your stream settings.

[Elettrone]

what you are saying doesn't make any sense...

[KillahBee]

The server PC runs the game at 1080p, the client PC WAS running it at 720p and I was getting artifacts, I NOW have it also running at 1080p and the artifacts are all gone.
This is with both machines doing hardward en/decoding

[Elettrone]

A small update, recently i noticed how they changed the encoder from NvFir to something else and if i keep the client data rate at 10 mbits i can play with almost any artifact showing up.
Offcourse the encoder quality still sux if compared to software but...it's something.
Still i don't get what the data rate has to do with the artifacts...maybe some valve tech can enlighten us?