Steam in-home streaming wireless vs wired

[Dan™]

Hey! So I just tried out steam in-home streaming from my gaming pc to my steamos pc and it was pretty good. I was playing Payday2 at 1080p, all low settings and with an xbox 360 controller. While it was streaming to my steamos, it was streaming pretty good with little lag (some lag spikes at times) and you could see that when you fired the gun on the pc, the sound on the tv comes half a second later. So I live in Australia where we have very ♥♥♥♥ slow internet, so If I turned the settings up there was more lag while streaming. So what I want to know is what would be better for streaming, wireless or wired? What exactly would be the difference and why would one be better than the other. Also, does streaming use a lot of internet?

[Shark]

Depends on your network speed, 300 N wireless works a lot better than a 100 mb/s wired connection. If you have gigabit wired, wired will be best, though. Depending on the signal streangth, wireless can drop a lot of frames.

Streaming also doesn't use your internet connection, at all. It only uses your home network. The speeds depend on the router/switch in between your 2 devices and the quality of the cables/wireless connection.

[Tchakizera]

1080p video stream uses less than 5Mbps. The problem in game streaming is lag, mostly caused by poor package management in wireless comunications.
Wireless suffer from the number of devices connected, as only one of them can talk at a time, and the high data collision rate, creating high jitter (variation in ping times). Also wireless devices need to keep sending null data, just to ensure they're still there. That's why no one will use wireless for networks that need high reliability.
So wired network its almost always better for game streaming. (unless you have a really, really old 10Mbps switch.)

[The-Game-Warden]

Hi Dan,

Wired will always be far superior to wireless. Valve had a chart (that I can't seem to find) when they first introduced streaming that showed how much better it was, and it was obvious. Wireless tends to get pretty laggy after more than about 10 feet from the router. If you can wire at least your farthest box to the router I'm sure a lot of the sound lag you're experiencing will go away. Of course wiring both boxes to the router will be best.

Hope that helps,
Nathan

[Shark]

Originally posted by Nate Wardawg:

Hi Dan,

Wired will always be far superior to wireless.

This really depends on what kind of connection you have. Wireless ac is faster than a wired gigabit connection. Getting a 10 gigabit connection is currenly a massive investment, 200 euros per pc and then you still need a router which supports it. So if speed is your only concern, wireless is faster.

[Tchakizera]

Originally posted by Shark:

So if speed is your only concern, wireless is faster.

Shark, saddly speed isn't the only concern here. Wireless connection is usually shared by various devices and only one of them can "talk" at a time. Higher transfer rates reduces the problem but not solve it.

Using a gigabit ethernet provide sufficient throughput for the stream, isolates the server/client connection from the other devices and provide the lowest possible ping times between them.
A 10Gbps network could transfer 1080p 60fps uncompressed video, but at the cost of a new high-end computer.

[Shedding]

Originally posted by Shark:

Originally posted by Nate Wardawg:

Hi Dan,

Wired will always be far superior to wireless.

This really depends on what kind of connection you have. Wireless ac is faster than a wired gigabit connection. Getting a 10 gigabit connection is currenly a massive investment, 200 euros per pc and then you still need a router which supports it. So if speed is your only concern, wireless is faster.

WIRELESS AC IS NOT FASTER THAN GIGABIT ETHERNET. Please guys, I see a lot of posts where people think a wifi signal will be faster than a wired signal. This is simply not true. Please google this stuff before posting erroneous information.

[Green Orange]

Originally posted by TheRadGamerDan:

Hey! So I just tried out steam in-home streaming from my gaming pc to my steamos pc and it was pretty good. I was playing Payday2 at 1080p, all low settings and with an xbox 360 controller. While it was streaming to my steamos, it was streaming pretty good with little lag (some lag spikes at times) and you could see that when you fired the gun on the pc, the sound on the tv comes half a second later. So I live in Australia where we have very shit slow internet, so If I turned the settings up there was more lag while streaming. So what I want to know is what would be better for streaming, wireless or wired? What exactly would be the difference and why would one be better than the other. Also, does streaming use a lot of internet?

A normal Cable network is faster then a excellent wifi network period. Please use google to find out why and look for keywords like full-duplex, interference and lag.

In-home streaming does not cost you internet data (although I haven't test if valve build in a call-home ping... which would suck and cost you a kb or so).

You ingame settings should not have any effect on the streaming data, except that the host get a higher workload and might trip on that. The In-home streaming settings have effect on the amount of streaming data.

[powerarmour]

I regularly get >20ms latency over my 300Mb/s N WiFi connection, hardly much to be worried about.