You know that old, pathetic laptop that you love dearly but really can’t run any games anymore? Well, it’s about to get a breath of new life – Steam In-Home Streaming lets you use your over-powered gaming rig to do the heavy lifting.
That’s right, Steam In-Home Streaming is live. Now, it’s still in beta, which means you need to opt into the Steam client beta on two computers. Yes, this feature is in beta, so they are using you to find out the recommended system requirements for hardware and network, but it still sounds pretty cool:
Steam in-home streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game process is actually running on another computer elsewhere in your home. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer and sent to the player’s computer. The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the player’s computer to the game process on the remote computer.
Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.
Wait, does this mean that I could stream PC games to my Mac? What a glorious day! I can finally make use of the husband’s awesome gaming rig without actually kicking him off the PC. Although, I wonder if he can stream Steam games to me and still have enough juice to play Minecraft on there. I’m still not sure how it all works, but if you’re keen for trying it out in beta, the world is your oyster. Play games on machines that actually can’t handle the processing, even in bed. Welcome to the future!
Last Updated: January 27, 2014
TiMsTeR1033
January 27, 2014 at 10:40
@zoe I think If was streaming a game to your mac It would take most of his resources unless was not very demanding game
Alien Emperor Trevor
January 27, 2014 at 10:40
I’m interested to see how well this works.
RinceThis2014
January 27, 2014 at 10:44
In SA? With out connection?
Alien Emperor Trevor
January 27, 2014 at 10:49
It’s over an in-home network, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem. I’m curious about things like input lag & how well it actually displays though.
RinceThis2014
January 27, 2014 at 10:50
Ya. Could be pretty awesome! My computer could run it!… No… wait…
Alien Emperor Trevor
January 27, 2014 at 11:07
I’m sure it could, just make sure the coal bins are full so you can get enough power.
Her Highness the Hipster
January 27, 2014 at 10:53
yeah, that’s what i’m thinking. home network should be quick (in theory) because not using our pathetic web access 🙂
Devourer of Small Bunnies
January 27, 2014 at 10:54
Myself. If they can ensure input lag is sub 50/60ms, I think its totally viable. Would love to know what kind of fidelity will be available on the slave, Im sure theyll be using all manners of compression.
Dean
January 27, 2014 at 10:52
Might actually have to give this a go, and see if Zoe can play PC only on the Mac.
Her Highness the Hipster
January 27, 2014 at 10:54
yay! Sanctum 2, here i come!
Admiral Chief in Vegas
January 27, 2014 at 11:03
We should jam that as well, epic game!
Devourer of Small Bunnies
January 27, 2014 at 10:53
😀 Holy crap. This is awesome. The old C2Quad I gots lying about can be migrated to the lounge. This is wonderful wonderful news… for pc gamers.
Uberutang
January 27, 2014 at 10:55
Been testing this a fair amount.
Host: i5, 16 gig ram, SLI 670. Win 7×64
Client: HP Proline microserver. Win 8 32 bit. 2 gig ram. Amd Turion CPU. AMD 5450 GPU.
Wifi: (.g) latency between my client and host is very high: 300ms +. YOU can view stuff, but not really play. .n would probably work fine for most games.
Ethernet (100mb): No latency between the ‘menu’s” at all. Some games work really well this way . Could play DeadLight and and State of Decay just fine. Could not play Batman AO. (very laggy).
Even forcing 720p/30fps did not really help for Batman.
Input latency was not really noticeable on the games worked.
Alt tab = full desktop remote access to host 😛
Quentin Huggett
January 27, 2014 at 11:05
Thanks for the feed back!
Robert Hart
January 27, 2014 at 11:08
How are FPS games with regards to delay? Same or worse compared to playing on your main pc?
Uberutang
January 27, 2014 at 11:13
It ‘felt’ the same as running a long HDMI cable from my rig to my pc and using a wireless xbox 360 remote to the rig. (about 10 m).
I want to see if I can get my hands on a ethernet over power kit to test also (or a dual band router). Running a cable kind of defeats the purpose ( I can run HDMI and that works 100% perfect on all games).
I have also played around with the ‘opensource’ nvidia shield app: Limelight. It works the same as Steam in home streaming, but only for NVIDIA host machines (kepler or better) and only over wifi.
Johan du Preez
January 27, 2014 at 12:15
It didn’t go live yet its still in closed beta since Dec 2013
Uberutang
January 27, 2014 at 14:40
I think they invited everybody to join that is/was part of the steam user group for this.
Johan du Preez
January 27, 2014 at 14:58
I have been part of the group since the day it started and still waiting for access. Just checked again and checking the steam group there is nothing that indicates this is happening.