So who all has bought a Steam Link (and Controller)?

Kall - what games have you played over steamlink? I thought I’d had some issues with lag, but maybe it was cpu strain.

The only two games I’ve extensively tried were Rocket League and God Eater. RL was noticably laggy and frustrating when I played a year-ish ago streaming via NVIDIA Shield but the lag has not been noticable to me so far on the Steam Link. The only change in between is I upgraded my GPU from a 660 to an AMD Fury, but since I could play RL at > 60fps on the 660 I don’t think that had anything to do with it.

I’ve also done some quick tests on Skyrim, Grim Dawn and Doom 2016 and didn’t notice any lag, but only did each for a few minutes.

Edit: I should also mention that I have a 1 acre property with no neighbors for a quarter mile or so on 3 sides of me, and my wireless router is in the next room over with only one non-exterior wall in between it and my steam link. So that probably allows me to have pretty optimal Wifi setup.

I also have a R7000 Nighthawk router that I paid close to $200 for, so I don’t have a run of the mill router as well.

Steam links are in surprisingly short supply right now. I wonder if they sold more than expected in the pre-christmas sales, or whether there’s something new coming.

I wanted to get jackbox on my TV…

I ordered mine January 2nd, literally less than an hour before the sale ended and got mine Saturday, so the supply seems fine to me. When did you order yours?

I haven’t ordered one - I wanted to, but saw that it was back ordered.

Gotcha, guess they had just enough units to satisfy sale demand and that was it.

Amazon got some in, restricted to Prime members. Mine should show up on Friday. We’ll see how this goes.

Let us know how it goes for you. It is interesting the perception and feel of the unit for people here and on different forums. There are people I know how play everything over Steamlink and are amazed at how smooth it is even over wifi. For me however, even over a solid wired connection it is a bit too laggy in any games that involve shooting. But I don’t know if the fact it is a mirroring device, and my computer monitor is a slower 60Hz max LCD, but my living room tv is plasma… if that does something to mess it up.

But since I suck at shooters I might be more sensitive and many of the games I try and run were designed run better with keyboard/mouse vs. gamepad and I am directly comparing them to my PS4 experience.

I don’t really play shooters, especially competitive ones, so I can’t comment on that sort of twitch response, but I played most of Watch Dogs 2 on it and for that style of game the lag was imperceptible.

I own one, they are quite nice, however my TV is too poor to display text well, i’m currently saving for a better one, like a Samsung 7 series or 8 maybe.

Played a bit of Transformers Devastation during the week on the Steam Link with my 5yo nephew. Only on the lowest difficulty and at 720p, but it still impresses me how good it looks and how little input lag there appears to be.

Just a note that the Steam link is on sale for $4.99 - 90% off during the steam sale. You’d be a fool to pass this up if you’ve never played your PC games on your TV ;-)

Or want an easy way to screen mirror your desktop.

If I have a 5 year old non gaming but fast labtop, do I need the steam link, or can this be used pretty effectively in it’s place, to stream games from my desktop?

The laptop will work great. Anything that can play 1080p h.264 video at 60fps can handle steam in-home streaming, and every even remotely modern intel CPU and GPU can do that. Actually, you can do it on a Raspberry Pi.

I picked up the Steam Link, after I tried streaming to a laptop which worked well but I don’t want to leave plugged into my TV.

It works well. Lower spec games I just leave running at 1440p. For example I tried Rayman Legends and it is excellent over the link - no perceptible lag, and it almost feels like a better game on the TV.

But, running Witcher 3 I had to lower in-game settings. I was running 1440p with dips to 30fps on my PC monitor (GTX 960), so maybe that’s the problem? To get smooth gameplay I needed to drop to 1080p and ‘high’ settings, which still look good. Does this make sense that rendering to a Link will cut maybe a third off of the performance of a demanding game?

I also picked up the controller. Feels weird, will have to force myself to give it a fair chance.

If your TV isn’t running the same resolution you’re rendering the game at, you’re going to see worse performance and probably some artifacting or distortion, yeah.

Me, I’m pissed at how XCOM 2 loves to get into bad states with the launcher. Plays great on a controller, but I seem to have about a 75 percent shot at launching the game successfully.

Odd you say that, because Witcher also acted a bit odd. Launch, game running, but didn’t change to the game window. Try again, error. Try again, error (as it’s already running). Try again, and it switches focus and works from there.

Just picked up an Xbox Elite Wireless Controller. I thought I had read somewhere that I could use it to play PC games via a Steam Link, but I’m sorta hitting a wall. How is this done exactly?

You have to plug it into the Steam Link with USB.

Elite controller doesn’t support bluetooth, so you can’t use it wirelessly without an adapter and this program unless there have been recent changes.