I was able to spend some more time with this, and I'm really impressed with how well it works. Image quality is great (50mbps HEVC), games play just as you'd expect with a Steam Controller, and latency is about the same as a typical TV or non-gaming monitor - so it's perfectly playable
I've been testing with faster-paced games and have not run into any problems caused by streaming vs playing locally.
I was able to get a full-screen resolution working on the 11" iPad now, since it's not 4:3 like the rest of them:
The issue was that custom DSR resolutions will crash the video driver badly if either the horizontal or vertical resolution are below your monitor's native resolution.
I knew that you couldn't use a custom resolution which was lower than your monitor's native in both dimensions, as that would crash the driver immediately, but 2388x1668 was working fine on the desktop with my 3440x1440 display since it still had to downscale the image due to the height. But it crashed the driver as soon as I tried to run anything 3D.
Unfortunately that means the solution is to create a DSR resolution in the same aspect ratio, but matching the longest resolution of the monitor - 3440x2400 in this case.
3440x2400 has almost exactly the same requirements as rendering at native 4K, which is too much for my GTX 1070 in many games. Even when testing older games like
DiRT 2, it was unable to hold 120 FPS absolutely 100% of the time.
Seeing games rendered at that resolution on such a high density display does look
really good though - especially if it's something where the demands are low enough that it does still run at 120 FPS.
If a game renders at the window size in windowed mode, you can also use "hotsampling" to run in the correct aspect ratio
without having to render at such a high resolution.
I set up a preset in
DisplayFusion which resizes a window to 2388x1668 - which works well for games that support this, and you could easily use something lower resolution than that if you aren't concerned about rendering at native resolution since it's a smaller display.
You may have noticed another issue that appeared when using this resolution instead of a 16:9 or 21:9 resolution, which would be letterboxed: the app doesn't tell the home bar to fade out, so it's always present over the game.
If you click exit big picture mode you can stream your pc. Works with uplay,epic,Xbox, etc. only thing is those games are in 30fps. I hope this isn't a bug.
I think I have found the cause of this now that I'm trying to run games at 3440x2400.
I don't know if it affects all games, but it seems that streaming is forcing games to run with
real double-buffered V-Sync.
Typically most games use triple-buffered V-Sync on NVIDIA GPUs no matter what you select these days, but when streaming via Steam it seems to force it. That means the stream will drop to divisors of the refresh rate. If you have a 120Hz device that is 120, 60, 40, 30, 24, 20. If you have a 60Hz device that will be 60, 30, 20, 15 etc.
I tested this by limiting a game to 72 FPS and it would run at 72 for a moment, then drop to 60, go back up to 72, and repeat, resulting in bad stuttering. In that case, I had to either reduce the settings so it would run at a constant 120 FPS, or limit it to 60 for a consistently smooth experience.
Hopefully this can be fixed, as it's quite a step back when you're used to G-Sync, or even a high refresh rate monitor using unlocked frame rates.
I've been trying to play point and click games with the mouse mode, and it's got this deal breaking thing where wherever you stop the mouse it acts as a click instead of just stopping. Is there a way to fix this?
It seems to depend on how the game handles input, as I've seen some where dragging does not also send a click. Hopefully it's something they can fix, or there is another workaround for it - possibly tools people have developed for playing these games on touchscreen devices?