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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.
