Steam Link game resolution

[TAHIRMIA]

My friend wants to get a steam link and he normally runs games at 720p but has a 1080p monitor, if he gets a steam link will games run at 720p on his 1080p tv or will it be upscaled to 1080p

[Changis]

2 minutes ago, TAHIRMIA said:

My friend wants to get a steam link and he normally runs games at 720p but has a 1080p monitor, if he gets a steam link will games run at 720p on his 1080p tv or will it be upscaled to 1080p

if the monitor upscales the image which it most likely does, it will be scaled to fill the screen, it doesnt get upscaled to 1080p only stretched to fill the screen, the signal is still 720

also, streaming on steam or xbox or ps4 give a bit of a deterioated experience as colors and the image gets a bit washed out due to video compression.. you might not notice it right away, but connect it directly and you see a substancial difference in image quality. though not everyone cares about that
if you can use cables, that's much better, but it should work fine for normal gaming, but please use cabled network if possible

[TAHIRMIA]

6 minutes ago, Changis said:

if the monitor upscales the image which it most likely does, it will be scaled to fill the screen, it doesnt get upscaled to 1080p only stretched to fill the screen, the signal is still 720

also, streaming on steam or xbox or ps4 give a bit of a deterioated experience as colors and the image gets a bit washed out due to video compression.. you might not notice it right away, but connect it directly and you see a substancial difference in image quality. though not everyone cares about that
if you can use cables, that's much better, but it should work fine for normal gaming, but please use cabled network if possible

So he will be playing an upscaled version of games

[KenjiUmino]

14 minutes ago, TAHIRMIA said:

My friend wants to get a steam link and he normally runs games at 720p but has a 1080p monitor

why he would do that is beyond my understanding but whatever. 

 

the resolution of the stream sent to the steam link will not be higher than what the game on the host runs at.

 

of course it will get upscaled by the steam link OR the TV but the same thing happens on your friends monitor right now when he plays in 720p on a 1080p monitor ... the monitor scales everything to its native resolution (unless you turn scaling off but then you would have a huge black frame around your 720p image) 

[Changis]

6 minutes ago, TAHIRMIA said:

So he will be playing an upscaled version of games

no, he'll be playing a stretched version of the game you are not adding information you are stretching the already constant signal..
if you take a projector showing video at 720p, does it become 1080p if you pull the projector back so the image size increases?

[KenjiUmino]

2 minutes ago, Changis said:

you are stretching the already constant signal.

stretching, upscaling ... different words for the same thing ..... make a lower res image fit a higher res display 

[TAHIRMIA]

12 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

why he would do that is beyond my understanding but whatever. 

 

the resolution of the stream sent to the steam link will not be higher than what the game on the host runs at.

 

of course it will get upscaled by the steam link OR the TV but the same thing happens on your friends monitor right now when he plays in 720p on a 1080p monitor ... the monitor scales everything to its native resolution (unless you turn scaling off but then you would have a huge black frame around your 720p image) 

He prefers the FPS at 720p cuz his card doesn't run games that well at 1080p

He plays in windowed mode, Does that affect anything?

[Changis]

4 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

stretching, upscaling ... different words for the same thing ..... make a lower res image fit a higher res display 

in my understanding upscaling is not loosing quality when scaling up (ie svg images ) while stretching looses quality as it is a lower resolution stretched out.. this ofcourse depends on the screen size, the bigger the screen the more it gets stretched as well, on a 23" or smaller monitor you probably would have a hard time seing any difference (other than icon and window scaling

[KenjiUmino]

1 minute ago, Changis said:

in my understanding upscaling is not loosing quality when scaling up (ie svg images ) while stretching looses quality as it is a lower resolution stretched out.. 

you always "loose quality" and it's always stretched out ... though "losing quality" is technically the wrong term because there is no information lost - the information was never there to beginn with and pulling it up to a bigger resolution makes this more clearly visible.

 

you can apply different filters to make it less painfull for the eye (nearest neighbor, bilinear- and bicubic interpolation, 2xSal) but in the end it's all stretching. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling

[Changis]

2 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

you always "loose quality" and it's always stretched out ... though "losing quality" is technically the wrong term because there is no information lost - the information was never there to beginn with and pulling it up to a bigger resolution makes this more clearly visible.

 

you can apply different filters to make it less painfull for the eye (nearest neighbor, bilinear- and bicubic interpolation, 2xSal) but in the end it's all stretching. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling

well, not lost as such, but the amount of information vs screensize differs, the larger the screen size, the less information it displays per inch..
let's just get Linus or Luke to make a tech quickee about this instead

[KenjiUmino]

10 minutes ago, Changis said:

let's just get Linus or Luke to make a tech quickee about this instead

i believe they already did

[PlayStation 2]

1 hour ago, TAHIRMIA said:

He prefers the FPS at 720p cuz his card doesn't run games that well at 1080p

He plays in windowed mode, Does that affect anything?

It'd force vertical sync to be enabled but that's really about it in terms of performance. It won't be impacted in any meaningful way most of the time.