Games By Russell Holly Feb. 7, 2014 9:30 am
As Valve enters the living room with Steam Machines, a lot of interesting ideas are coming together to make the entire Steam experience uniquely tuned to the needs of PC gamers. One of those ideas is In-Home Streaming, and it might be in beta but that already works surprisingly well.
Game streaming is not a new concept, but it’s something no one else has working particularly well yet. Nvidia’s Gamestream*first started out as a beta feature for the Shield handheld, and the experience was never really something that I found particularly enjoyable. Valve’s service works on a similar principal, where you have one PC doing all the heavy lifting elsewhere on the network while it looks like the game is playing on the machine you actually want to play on. This concept is attractive to people with underpowered ultrabooks or tablets, as well as future Steam Machine users who want to play on their televisions. If you’ve been invited to the beta you can check it out for yourself today.
Intel’s NUC would be a fine streaming box
It’s difficult — at least with software like this — to establish a baseline, and not just because it’s in beta. There are a tremendous number of variables in your network that can contribute to either positively or negatively affecting something like device-to-device streaming. Whether or not both machines are wired via ethernet or connected via WiFi is the largest factor, but beyond that there’s the overall performance of the two machines involved to consider. Everything is a factor, the OS you’re running and the apps running in the background can contribute just as much as the network card you have installed on your desktop. It’s unlikely that there are a lot of environments for In-Home Streaming that are totally identical from user to user, which presents an impressive set of challenges.
Valve addresses this problem by making Steam the only thing your host machine and your client machine need to have in common. You sign in to Steam on both machines with your lesser machine (say, a laptop), and every In-Home Streaming supported game you have installed on the host machine becomes available on the client machine. The game appears in your library as though you have it installed, and when you click on it you’ll see the “play” icon has been changed to “stream” on the landing page for the game. Clicking that button starts up the game as though it were installed on your machine, and the game launches on the host machine.
Something important to keep in mind with In-Home Streaming is that the game is playing on the host machine while you are streaming it. The display on the host machine is filled with the game, and as far as a random onlooker is concerned there’s a ghost playing a game. This can be something of a jarring experience, especially since there’s no audio coming from it. If someone tries to minimize or move away from the game being played on the host machine while you are streaming the game, Steam currently becomes confused and the game just sort of pauses on your end. While you are streaming a game, both machines are completely occupied.
Next page: Torture testing In-Game Streaming…
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Game streaming is not a new concept, but it’s something no one else has working particularly well yet. Nvidia’s Gamestream*first started out as a beta feature for the Shield handheld, and the experience was never really something that I found particularly enjoyable. Valve’s service works on a similar principal, where you have one PC doing all the heavy lifting elsewhere on the network while it looks like the game is playing on the machine you actually want to play on. This concept is attractive to people with underpowered ultrabooks or tablets, as well as future Steam Machine users who want to play on their televisions. If you’ve been invited to the beta you can check it out for yourself today.
Intel’s NUC would be a fine streaming boxIt’s difficult — at least with software like this — to establish a baseline, and not just because it’s in beta. There are a tremendous number of variables in your network that can contribute to either positively or negatively affecting something like device-to-device streaming. Whether or not both machines are wired via ethernet or connected via WiFi is the largest factor, but beyond that there’s the overall performance of the two machines involved to consider. Everything is a factor, the OS you’re running and the apps running in the background can contribute just as much as the network card you have installed on your desktop. It’s unlikely that there are a lot of environments for In-Home Streaming that are totally identical from user to user, which presents an impressive set of challenges.
Valve addresses this problem by making Steam the only thing your host machine and your client machine need to have in common. You sign in to Steam on both machines with your lesser machine (say, a laptop), and every In-Home Streaming supported game you have installed on the host machine becomes available on the client machine. The game appears in your library as though you have it installed, and when you click on it you’ll see the “play” icon has been changed to “stream” on the landing page for the game. Clicking that button starts up the game as though it were installed on your machine, and the game launches on the host machine.
Something important to keep in mind with In-Home Streaming is that the game is playing on the host machine while you are streaming it. The display on the host machine is filled with the game, and as far as a random onlooker is concerned there’s a ghost playing a game. This can be something of a jarring experience, especially since there’s no audio coming from it. If someone tries to minimize or move away from the game being played on the host machine while you are streaming the game, Steam currently becomes confused and the game just sort of pauses on your end. While you are streaming a game, both machines are completely occupied.
Next page: Torture testing In-Game Streaming…
More...
