Tag: Speeds

Is streaming feasible on the Steam Deck or to the computer?

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The Preface of this post

Let’s begin with that what I am about to talk about is probably not even going to work for most of you because it would require way to much money to upgrade your home networking. This however is going to be something to understand and consider in your future upgrade plans for your home networking. Nothing here right now will stop you from streaming or make it useful but it will be a chance to educate you on how you might want to proceed in the future and make the experience a little more enjoyable. You also have the options of downloading games and installing onto your steam deck but someone games won’t work with the Steam as well as streaming them. This topic will at least maybe make it more enjoyable for you and make it so you can stream and not be pulling your hair out in the process.

Bandwidth will be the issue

Depending on what your computer you are using that you want to stream to your Steam Deck, the issue will be for the time being the amount of information that is sent to the Steam Deck.   Most  games are playing at the Highest possible settings and that requires the information to be transmittable to the Steam Deck.   Something like 1440p or really good RTX graphics card will want to send all this information to the Steam Deck.   There will be movement Lag or game lag even if you had the best home network in the world.  I can’t see this being without some form of lag.   You are essentially trying to send loads of data over either wired to Wireless or Wireless to Wireless, or even Wireless to Wired connections.    Even then you have a cap of how much data can be sent to through the air or though a wired connection.

Wired VS Wireless

Let’s Now talk about the speed caps and how much you will most likely get with each one of them.   According the LifeWire, You will get these types of speed:

I tend to think this is somewhat accurate because I can’t see this not being any faster than this in most cases. You have objects in the way to get to the wireless whether it being a Door, a Wall, or even other objects. That will tend to slow the connection down because of errors and bandwidth.  Even then even if you had gotten a 802.11ax wireless router the Steam Deck right now could only do the 802.11ac so that would mean it could only do 200 mbps(Milibytes Per Second) even at the best of times.

Now let’s talk about Wired options.   You can buy  dock that will connect to your wired network but the Steam Deck Dock will only do 1 Gbps which is way faster than you could wireles.   You would need  to do several things to get a faster connection.   One buy a Switch or Router that is 2.5Gbps capable, and upgrade your wired connections to a Cat 7 or 8.  You’d also need a 2.5Gb Ethernet connection to the Steam Deck by using a USB-C to 2.5gb Ethernet connection.  You can also use this to download games faster if you have a already have installed a big enough HDD or maybe you expanded your MicroSD card selections.  I have not yet to found a dock that will support 2.5gbps that will work with the Steam Deck but I am not sure if they even make them just yet.  It would be nice but I doubt anyone but maybe Steam Deck will incorporate that into their next versions of the DOCK.  You will also need to make sure you Desktop system that you want to stream from or two is capabile of thw 2.5gb also on a wired network.  You will need to check with the company that you bought your system from or check the motherboards website to see if it has a 2.5gbs ethernet connection.  Most gaming systems or motherboards will already havea 2.5gbs connection but some don’t.  So you might need to buy a 2.4gb ethernet connection dongle for the laptop or desktop in question.

Game performance tweaks

Finally with all that  being said, the last way to not have so much game lag while streaming is drop your resolution of the game and make the game run with less graphics.  Turn off DLSS and other options in the game, also if it says it is running best possible graphics, drop it down to mid way or lower and that will allow the information tobe transmitted faster to your streaming device such as the Steam Deck.  Even with this, it might still be a little slugish and slow to respond.  So the best approach, I have come up with is to download the games onto the Steam Deck and try to play them on the steam without streaming them.  I’ve found that most games work rather well playing from the Steam Deck than to try to stream them.   The only one so far I haven’t had a chance to try to figure out is Micrisoft Flight Simulator 2020.  I am hopeful they will release a patch for that so that I can play that on my Steam Deck.  Although, I have begun to try to figure out a way to get it to run on the steam deck like it does on the Linux machines I’ve used in the past.  Hopefully I will come up with a Hack to do that.

What’s your thoughts on Streaming Vs Downloading?  Do you have any problems streaming or have you had similar issues?  What games seem to run smoothly while streaming or did you have any games that will work well streaming?  I’d like to hear your results also.

How to install Steam Games faster than ever on the Steam Deck!

Paul


The Steam Deck Rocks

I first got this today but I have so many games on Steam, You’d think it would take very long.   The problem is that you probably don’t know this little tip to help you get your steam games onto the steam deck quicker.   I am going to talk about a few ways you could increase your download speed on the Steam Deck.   This won’t be a hard lesson for some but it will be an eye opening lesson for others.    The real question is how I did it and how can you make downloading your games much faster and easier.   The simple truth is I used a USB-C Dongle From Amazon to do that.   Most of the time downloading from WIFI can be fast but it can also be slow due to the limits of bandwidth on the WIFI network.  You can download way faster on wired than you can on wireless.   That will always be the case.

Disconnect from WIFI

This is something else I found out is that if you didn’t disconnect from the WIFI in the steam settings it would still be slow to download while connected to the dongle.   After disconnecting from the WIFI my speed downloads jumped up and I could get those really big games installed in half the time.  This is one of those little tips no one told you about with the Steam Deck.  To disconnect from WIFI when you are using a USB-C Dongle or a USB-C DOCK. A USB-C Dock is just a bigger and bulker version of the dongle because you can plug in keyboards and mice into and use it like a computer. This is definitely something I will be trying later on. I am quite curious to see if I can plug in a joystick or use a Bluetooth joystick to play games from my television set in the living room.

Streaming Games

If you plan on streaming games to another part of the house with your Steam Deck, you’ll want to also plug it in and make sure that you have enough bandwidth to stream games from your computer to the Steam Deck.   I think this one will also apply for the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld also, if you plan to stream with the Logitech gaming handheld it will work a lot better if you can get a hard connection with that like you can with the Steam Deck.  

Download speeds

The only draw back I can see right now is the download speeds are limited to how fast the NVME or the SD card you are using can be written to.  So that may be a draw back from some people who got the slow SD cards that are barely able to keep up.   The best kind I can suggest are the SD cards that are designed for quick read and writes the ones that are in the 160MB/s are probably you best bet but you can use the 100MB/s read and write speeds if you like.  It will still be fast enough to play games on and will make your gaming experience better no matter which one you uses.

These are just a few things I’ve noticed once I got my Steam deck.   I will talk more about it in the coming weeks but I thought this would help other install their games or stream their games faster.   What else do you want to know about the Steam Deck, why not comment below and let me know what you interested in knowing or finding out?