Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris defaulted to recognizing the keyboard attached to my PC, making it impossible to play with two players using controllers. Duck Game wouldn’t recognize controller inputs and was impossible to quit using the Steam overlay to exit the game left it running in the background with menu music at full blast. I encountered these issues again and again streaming to the Steam Link in a variety of games. An afternoon of testing games on the Steam Link usually means trudging upstairs to my PC half a dozen times to close a pop-up that pulled me out of the game I was trying to stream, restarting Steam after it mysteriously crashed, or closing a game that suddenly refuses to take controller inputs. Most frustrating, those crashes and streaming issues often require problem-solving on the host PC. But those times are rare, and actually playing a game means wading through crashes, controller frustrations, and streaming compatibility issues. Those are the positives: when streaming works, it works well. Steam warns that this setting increases latency, but I didn’t feel any more latency while playing, nor did I notice a significant increase in the real-time monitoring tool built into In-Home Streaming. Turning the bitrate from ‘automatic’ to ‘unlimited’ fixed this problem, ramping bandwidth usage up well past 30 megabits per second in exchange for a much clearer image.
When I tested with tower defense game Tower Wars, the number of projectiles and fast-moving units on the screen turned my entire image into a blocky, ugly mess of video encoding artifacts–there was just too much data for the bitrate to handle. In busier games, the image quality suffers badly. The default ‘automatic’ bitrate will retain a mostly clear picture in slower-paced games with simpler levels of graphical detail. Latency over a wired connection is basically nonexistent, usually hovering around 0.1 milliseconds.
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