Valve In-Home Game Streaming Supports Windows, OS X & Linux

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Valve has today pushed out a new update to its Steam client on all three of the major OSes that finally takes In-home Game-Streaming out of beta. Similar to NVIDIA's GameStream, which streams native gameplay from a GeForce-equipped PC to the NVIDIA SHIELD, Valve's solution lets you stream from one PC to another, regardless of which OS it's running. What this means is you could have a SteamOS-based PC in your living-room, which is of course Linux-based, and stream games from your Windows PC in another room which ordinarily would never run under Linux. Likewise, you could stream a game from a Windows PC to an OS X machine, or vice versa."

Summary not entirely accurate.

[Winckle]

"Likewise, you could stream a game from a Windows PC to an OS X machine, or vice versa."

Unfortunately, the vice versa part isn't quite there yet, only Windows PCs can be the host OS at the moment. Valve do intend to patch in host functionality on Linux and OS X eventually though.

Re:Is this basically VNC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly. I tried using VNC and it's ilk to stream a simple game of Hearthstone and it was terrible. Then one day, I started playing a Steam game on my laptop. I thought the graphics were above average but didn't think much of it, and then I finally realized that I was playing a game hosted on my desktop PC when I remembered that I had never downloaded that particular game to my laptop. That's how transparent Valve made it. I didn't even know it was enabled and I was using it.

Tried it!

[duke_cheetah2003]

This is a pretty nice feature they added. It's much better than VNC or any other remote desktop software I've tried. About my only complaint was the mouse was a bit laggy running Skyrim.

But seeing Skyrim stream pretty much flawlessly to computer than can BARELY play 1080p videos without some chop was pretty amazing.

+1 Steam ^.^

I tested it in beta

[wbr1]

I tested from win 7 to win 7. I have my semi-big gaming/office rig, and streamed to a late model P4 with no GPU of note (chipset intel), that I used as a storage box/htpc in my bedroom. I could stream skyrim pretty much full blast well, however I did notice a reduction in quality. It varied, but there was sometimes lag (quite possibly poor wifi and the woeful nature of an old p4 struggling with windows 7) and obvious compression artifacts, but for the most part it was well playable. One side note is that when it launched on my other PC, I could hear the audio from it, so at least at that point in the beta it wasn't muting the source machine audio. If you left big speakers on 11 that could be an issues, but hopefully it is fixed now. I did not test it long as I rebuilt my main rig, and the old one became my bedroom htpc, and had plenty of horsepower to play without streaming. All in all I think a good feature with many use cases.

Re:Is this basically VNC?

[Brulath]

But it prompts you to alert you that you're about to stream a game with a picture and all?

I just tried it out on my macbook, streaming over 1gbps ethernet from a computer sitting next to it. At 2560x1440 on Beautiful on both ends it was pretty laggy - lot of frames dropped, input wasn't super great with the mouse. With Borderlands 2 I enabled performance overlay, which reported it was running at 19.9fps with "slow encode, decode" written above at 2560x1440 Beautiful. At 1080p Beautiful and Balanced it gave me 60fps when there was little change on the screen and 30fps when I spun the camera around my character constantly. Moving the mouse around on the host computer gave fairly fluid panning on the menu screen, whilst using the mac's mouse involved a lot of jerking around (more jerkiness at lower fps, but even at 60 neither game seemed to interpolate the movements at all).

That's with mouse usage though, with a controller it might work pretty well - less precise movement. Overall pretty neat though, kinda wondering how it'd go through hamachi or similar (have aussie nbn, so 40mbit up might work if the latency isn't too bad). Tested on a Core i7 3770K with nVidia 680 SLi -> Macbook Pro 2012ish (whatever was the last iteration before the new slim model).

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