I spent some time troubleshooting my outdated machine’s Steam streaming performance and had a little baby breakthrough after realizing I could re-enable the Intel iGPU in the bios, connect one of my monitors to it and then have Steam use it just for hardware video encoding instead of trying and failing to use the very outdated ATI card I have in there.
Should be good enough for now until upgrading to a newer ATI now that CRT_emudriver has supported the more modern models (and Windows 10, a project for another day) for a couple years now.
It’s running acceptable for adventure-y stuff but I think next I will either try to experiment with powerline ethernet adapters, upgrading to a wireless AC from the N card currently installed, or trying to run like 100 feet of ethernet cable along the ceiling with staples?
I wonder if you could get a hack-y workaround with a dummy hdmi plug or software to spoof an additional monitor, if you’ve got a free port, and set big picture mode to output to it. It’ll still takeover as primary, which I guess is kind of a necessary evil with how most pc games don’t handle multiple monitors well, and would prob. be annoying to try to do desktop stuff while it was running.
I just got the Steam Link in today, as well, and it lets me control the menus with the dpad on the DS4 I have hooked up, and I think I was also able to control big picture on the host with its keyboard (though didn’t try controlling from a gamepad on both ends) while streaming.
I also booted up the GeForce Now beta again, for a few minutes, on my wife’s Macbook Air and that thing is still amazing to me, it works very well; I could see paying for this if I had real interest in contemporary big graphics games. I stumbled onto the fact that, contrary to what they advertise, you can seemingly install anything you own on Steam onto their virtual machine - not just the stuff they have listed in their client. Tried the FF15 demo and SF4, runs noticeably better than Steam streaming over wifi.