Steam in home streaming problems

[nicholician]

I have a pretty good gaming PC that I've set-up to run all my games at a minimum of 60 FPS, even if it means sacrificing a bit of graphics quality to get there. Full specs list is in my signature.

 

SO I also have a half-decent laptop from 4 years ago that I want to stream my games to, and don't get me wrong, this thing barely has graphics to speak of (Intel i5 3000 series graphics), but the framerates are peasantry and I'm not standing for it (>30 with many drops below 25, pretty bad.). I've tried this before on the same laptop, but with a different windows install and everything ran great. The thing is, it's not just that my laptop isn't able to handle decoding these games; if I go back to my desktop to play my games from there, the same frame rates are there (checked with fraps on three games).

 

So what am I doing wrong?

[Adahop]

Your i5 might be struggling to encode the stream any faster than that. It's having to do all the same work it would have to do to encode it as a compressed video file on the fly, except it's streaming it rather than saving it.

[nicholician]

Your i5 might be struggling to encode the stream any faster than that. It's having to do all the same work it would have to do to encode it as a compressed video file on the fly, except it's streaming it rather than saving it.

 

True, and I know that the laptop is definitely not meant for any heavy tasks, however it was working just fine a while ago and now it seems to have a 30 fps cap, i have no idea why. 

[Adahop]

I assume your desktop's resolution is higher than your laptop's. Is it streaming at a resolution that makes sense for playback on your laptop, or is it wasting rendering/processing power on more pixels than you can see?

[nicholician]

I assume your desktop's resolution is higher than your laptop's. Is it streaming at a resolution that makes sense for playback on your laptop, or is it wasting rendering/processing power on more pixels than you can see?

 

Both my laptop and desktop have primary 1080p displays. I guess I could just turn down the resolution, but I still don't understand why it worked before on 1080p...

 

(That's a lie. My laptop primarily has a resolution of I believe 1024x768, however it is plugged into a 1080p television that I use as the primary monitor, cause I like to play some games from the couch. Still, both are using 1080p)

[PlayStation 2]

Both my laptop and desktop have primary 1080p displays. I guess I could just turn down the resolution, but I still don't understand why it worked before on 1080p...

 

(That's a lie. My laptop primarily has a resolution of I believe 1024x768, however it is plugged into a 1080p television that I use as the primary monitor, cause I like to play some games from the couch. Still, both are using 1080p)

My guess is on the laptop being Windows 10.

[nicholician]

My guess is on the laptop being Windows 10.

 

Windows 7; I tried to get Windows 10 going on it, but it wouldn't want to work.

[PlayStation 2]

Windows 7; I tried to get Windows 10 going on it, but it wouldn't want to work.

That's odd.

My money is on network issues?

[nicholician]

That's odd.

My money is on network issues?

 

Nope. I figured out what the problem was too. Apparently, if you start steam in big picture mode and then immediately start in home streaming before even installing a game, it sets your refresh rate to 30Hz. No clue why, but that was the problem.

 

The only problem I need to solve now is the latency from my desktop to my laptop... one runs on ethernet and the other on wifi... Let's see how this goes.