Fiber Optic Cable for Distant Gaming

[Makato333]

I have a few TV's in my home and was curious of alternative routes that I could explore for gaming around the house. I have tried Steam Link and Nvidia Shield but experience issues with both even with strong internet and hardware. Steam Link has issues with my display lagging and or just crashing and Nvidia shield tends to have a TON of input lag. I have tried both with direct Ethernet and wifi.

 

 

SO my question is, what about just running a display cable to it? From my understanding you need a fiber optic cable because the length can reach up to about 30 feet for my circumstance right now currently and the distance requires high speeds. Second part to my question is input... would running a controller directly to the TV be recognized as an input on my PC or would I need some insane bluetooth stuff going on to make this dream a reality? 

 

Lastly, if you have any better suggestions please let me know. My display is a 4k Sony HDR smart TV (not certain the exact model but it was just shy of $1,000 when I bought it and it's nothing to special pretty basic)

[Firewrath9]

Fiber optic is expensive AF.

[Makato333]

2 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

Fiber optic is expensive AF.

Yeah I know it's gonna cost me over 100$ for a cable that isn't my issue to be honest. I just want to know the best route and best possible way to experience my computers power from other places in the house without having to move it to said rooms. 

 

[mariushm]

Using fiber instead of ethernet cable won't help you because they'll have the same latency and speed... your problem is not the cable, but it's the actual encoding of the image into some compressed stream which gets sent through the network cable and then decoded back into raw image... it's unavoidable to have some ms worth of delay.

 

You can buy HDMI cables that use fiber to carry the signal ... basically, they have chips at both ends which convert the hdmi signal to light that goes through fiber, and then at the other end the chip reads the light and converts it back to hdmi

Here's an amazon page, can't tell which one is the best: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hdmi+fiber&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

There may be HDMI cables or DisplayPort cables that can do 30ft or more without using fiber, basically they have either a strong amplifier chip on one end sending a higher power signal through the cable, or somewhere in the cable they have a "repeater" chip which picks the weakened signal and re-amplifies it

 

Here's an example of a 50ft DisplayPort cable with a built in boost processor to amplify signal (note this particular one I think it's limited to maximum 2560x1600): https://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-Cable-50-15m-Active/dp/B00EG3YA2G/

 

Here's a 50ft HDMI cable that claims it can do 4K ... cheap at 30$ : https://www.amazon.com/Cable-supports-FullHD-Ethernet-KabelDirekt/dp/B008U7SLJW/

 

There's also USB cables that are longer than 5m, and usb cables which use fiber to get long distances (with such cases you need a powered USB hub, you basically use the fiber usb cable just to transfer DATA between pc and usb hub, and the usb hub powers everything (keyboard, mouse, gamepad etc)

[Makato333]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Using fiber instead of ethernet cable won't help you because they'll have the same latency and speed... your problem is not the cable, but it's the actual encoding of the image into some compressed stream which gets sent through the network cable and then decoded back into raw image... it's unavoidable to have some ms worth of delay.

 

You can buy HDMI cables that use fiber to carry the signal ... basically, they have chips at both ends which convert the hdmi signal to light that goes through fiber, and then at the other end the chip reads the light and converts it back to hdmi

Here's an amazon page, can't tell which one is the best: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hdmi+fiber&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

There may be HDMI cables or DisplayPort cables that can do 30ft or more without using fiber, basically they have either a strong amplifier chip on one end sending a higher power signal through the cable, or somewhere in the cable they have a "repeater" chip which picks the weakened signal and re-amplifies it

 

Here's an example of a 50ft DisplayPort cable with a built in boost processor to amplify signal : https://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-Cable-50-15m-Active/dp/B00EG3YA2G/

 

There's also USB cables that are longer than 5m, and usb cables which use fiber to get long distances (with such cases you need a powered USB hub, you basically use the fiber usb cable just to transfer DATA between pc and usb hub, and the usb hub powers everything (keyboard, mouse, gamepad etc)

Very informative I am going to browse these options a bit when I get some free time from work and try them out. 

 

Is there any alternative options that would provide more optimal results? 

[mariushm]

The optimal is to have direct connection between the video card and TV, this way you get the minimum latency.

Any in-between like nVidia Shield or Steam Link implies processing which adds latency.

 

Note that I edited my previous message and added a note about the DisplayPort cable I linked to, and also added an example HDMI cable that's 50ft long.

 

 

 

[Makato333]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

The optimal is to have direct connection between the video card and TV, this way you get the minimum latency.

Any in-between like nVidia Shield or Steam Link implies processing which adds latency.

 

 

 I will check out some of the cords and try a direct connection. Hopefully it provides great results. Appreciate it again thanks

[mariushm]

For completeness, here's an example of a 50ft USB 2.0 cable : https://www.amazon.com/Pasow-Female-Extension-Cable-Speed/dp/B018LYWWKM/

 

Basically as I explained already above, it uses a "repeater" chip somewhere in the cable to re-amplify the signals that become weak with distance. You can see in the pictures.

 

So you can have your computer away from TV, and you can have this long USB cable all the way to your sofa or wherever and plug it into a powered usb hub, and then you can plug keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick, whatever into the usb hub.

It's USB 2.0 cable, so you only get 480mbps, but honestly for a mouse and keyboard and gamepad, you don't really care about speed.

 

This cable claims USB 3.0 speeds and I don't see why it wouldn't be capable of it : https://www.amazon.com/MutecPower-Active-Extension-chipsets-Booster/dp/B07MFW93B4/

Here's another, from a better known brand : https://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-SuperSpeed-Extension-U330-15M/dp/B01M1D9UIN/