Activating Hardware Decoding? (Steam In-Home Streaming question)

Originally Posted by Fluent
I was thinking about a tablet, or maybe a 2-in-1, but I think I would rather have a nice 15" or 17" display, full HD. Since I have a pretty powerful rig streaming the games at 1080p 60 FPS, it's only right I have a client that can handle it.

I'm thinking a used/refurbished Dell XPS M1710. Full 1920x1080 resolution, 17" screen, Nvidia graphics, a dual core processor at 2.0 ghz and a few gigs of RAM. Should be enough to handle the job nicely, right?

To tell you the truth, I think the biggest issue you may have is not the hardware itself. If you're using a wireless connection, just to test, try connecting the laptop wired to the network and see if the speed issues remain or not. If they remain then yes, could be the hardware capabilites, but maybe it'll work fine, in which case it's a matter of wireless vs. wired and not much to do with decoding speed.

Originally Posted by wolfing
To tell you the truth, I think the biggest issue you may have is not the hardware itself. If you're using a wireless connection, just to test, try connecting the laptop wired to the network and see if the speed issues remain or not. If they remain then yes, could be the hardware capabilites, but maybe it'll work fine, in which case it's a matter of wireless vs. wired and not much to do with decoding speed.

I tested both wireless and wired connections and it works good either way. The problem seems to come when I play demanding games on max settings. My Alienware can run the game no sweat, but the client struggles to display it at 60 FPS.

I experimented a bit with the settings and got it to run pretty decently with minimal hiccups (mostly by capping the streaming bandiwth at 15Mbps), but now I'm wanting that full 1080p display . I'm currently locked at 720p with the client laptop as it doesn't support full HD, and I'm still getting a bit of frame loss that I don't want.

I really just need something basic that has full HD resolution capabilities and a decent sized screen. That's why I'm thinking the Dell XPS M1710 might be exactly what I need. A nice 17" full HD display at a cheap price.

I'm not sure why you need a streaming laptop if the host is a laptop too ?

Originally Posted by ilm
I'm not sure why you need a streaming laptop if the host is a laptop too ?

The host is a desktop replacement laptop. Big, bulky, heavy, with a million things plugged into it, such as a music keyboard and other USB devices. So, I'd rather just have a nice 1080p laptop to stream to.

Oops. Makes a lot of sense then. Laptop you mention seems ideal. But will you notice the difference between 720p and 1080p on 17 inch ? Especially with the h264 compression

Originally Posted by ilm
Oops. Makes a lot of sense then. Laptop you mention seems ideal. But will you notice the difference between 720p and 1080p on 17 inch ? Especially with the h264 compression

I've been streaming a few games on this 15" 720p laptop, and it's making me miss the resolution on my 17" 1080p laptop. So yes, I do think it's worth going full HD…

Then go for it!

My only concern really is that the Dell XPS M1710 is from 2006…yikes…that's old for a computer…however, it was a $4200 laptop at that time, so I think maybe it has a little juice left…maybe.

my current laptop is a refurb but much newer, you may check in ebay. Mine is an Asus i5-4200u 15.6" 1080p 6GB with touchscreen that I bought in February, bought it for $480 and so far so good.

Originally Posted by wolfing
my current laptop is a refurb but much newer, you may check in ebay. Mine is an Asus i5-4200u 15.6" 1080p 6GB with touchscreen that I bought in February, bought it for $480 and so far so good.

Nice, that sounds like a very good bang for the buck.

I can't really spend that much right now, I'm kind of limited to $300 and under, so it makes it a bit tough to find something relatively new with the full HD screen that I'm after.

I'm also kind of stuck on a 17" screen. I have a 15" now and it's okay, but I would love a bigger screen in full HD.

I think if I wait a bit longer I could find something better on Ebay. There occasionally seems to be some killer deals on gaming laptops that can be had there. Heck, I bought my Alienware M17X R4 from there for a great deal. It was only 6 months old, used less than 10 times and retailed for over $2500.

A new concern has arisen

"Will hardware decoding work with an Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX?"

It's an older card, so I'm not sure. Someone on Steam forums said they can't get older AMD cards to use hardware decoding with Steam streaming, so what about older Nvidia cards?

The 7950 GTX for sure seems to have hardware acceleration, H.264 decoding and what not. I just hope it will be activated by streaming with Steam.

Any ideas or thoughts on this?

I know I know

$150 for a 23 inch monitor and an $100 amazon fire TV* for in your bedroom

* whenever steam comes to android (it does) or something else (cheap chrome/ultrabook) if you want to have it now

Edit. If it has h254 decoding then it will be enabled in windows

I'm told that anything older than the 8800gt is not going to use hardware decoding in Steam streaming. Do you know anything about that? Apparently, anything older than the 8800gt doesn't support full PureVideo implementation. But I'm wondering if full PureVideo implementation is needed, or if partial features would be good enough.

Well, I won an auction for this laptop > http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-XPS-M17…-/221537073701

I think it will work great. We'll see. I'll report back once I've tested it.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Well, I won an auction for this laptop > http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-XPS-M17…-/221537073701

I think it will work great. We'll see. I'll report back once I've tested it.

but it's a GeForce 7950GTX, thought you said HW decoding wouldn't work on that? (or is that 'after' 8800GT? I hate confusing model numbers)

Originally Posted by wolfing
but it's a GeForce 7950GTX, thought you said HW decoding wouldn't work on that? (or is that 'after' 8800GT? I hate confusing model numbers)

To be honest, I'm not sure if it will work or not. Someone told me it wouldn't, but when I checked the feature set of the 7950GTX, it showed that it supported H.264 decoding and Nvidia PureVideo. I've gotten conflicting reports on all these old graphics cards so I figure I just have to try them for myself. If it works, great, if it doesn't, I'll re-sell it and try something else.

I got around and installed steam on my linux laptop too. After some initial firewall enough it worked beautiful… Except for choppy sound and a hiccup every 20 seconds or so.

I'm streaming twice over WiFi (host and client on WiFi) so it isn't really mysterious. Though I'm hoping to get it a bit better by twiddling with the quality settings or router settings (QoS ? 5 GHz ?). Then finally I can start with my DOS play through! (Ranger and battlemage, it had been decided).

I also got software decoding on the client, though this should have been solved in the beta (dell laptop with integrated Intel). I think I'm using hardware encoding not sure (it says d3d9 encoding).

Lastly I heard that your WiFi scanning periodically for networks can cause these spikes, let's see if I can turn that off. Would love to get it running smooth over wifi

Originally Posted by ilm
I got around and installed steam on my linux laptop too. After some initial firewall enough it worked beautiful… Except for choppy sound and a hiccup every 20 seconds or so.

I'm streaming twice over WiFi (host and client on WiFi) so it isn't really mysterious. Though I'm hoping to get it a bit better by twiddling with the quality settings or router settings (QoS ? 5 GHz ?). Then finally I can start with my DOS play through! (Ranger and battlemage, it had been decided).

I also got software decoding on the client, though this should have been solved in the beta (dell laptop with integrated Intel). I think I'm using hardware encoding not sure (it says d3d9 encoding).

Lastly I heard that your WiFi scanning periodically for networks can cause these spikes, let's see if I can turn that off. Would love to get it running smooth over wifi

That's about the same as my experience. Once in a while the sound misbehaves and every so often (more than 20 seconds though, more like once every 5 minutes or so) I see a 'slow connection' and screen goes low-res for a couple of seconds. Host is wired but client is wireless.

Well, the 7950 GTX doesn't perform as well as I expected. Can't really handle 1080p at 60 FPS and doesn't seem to use hardware decoding in Steam streaming.

Oh well, on to the next thing. I'm going to try the 9800m which has the full PureVideo implementation and I think that should be what I need. We'll see

I have this working with my desktop as host and my Alienware M11x as the client. But, I have another problem, which is massive screen tearing - which appears on both the client and the host when playing. I'm guessing they're enforcing VSYNC off on the host, because it might be a problem decoding and streaming with VSYNC.

I can't stand screen tearing, so this means my streaming plan will likely not work at all with Steam in-home streaming.

Oh well.