I’ve gotten back into my Steam library because of NVidia’s GeForce Now service, but there’s a handful of games I own but can’t play because the publishers won’t let NVidia stream them. The most resource intensive game I’m interested in is probably Batman: Arkham City, though I’d also like to use Dolphin to emulate some older Wii/GC games. What I’d like to do is add to my stable of NUCs/NUC-like systems in my networking closet, and stream to my Shield TV. I tried doing this with my fastest NUC, which is still only a Pentium SIlver J5005; while it’s at least got QuickSync, my expectations were very low, and I got about what I expected. The encoding process ate up every available CPU cycle, and left nothing to actually run a game. Would something like this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/mini-pc-review-the-ryzen-5-pro-2500u-powered-minisforum-um250/ do what I’m looking for? Anything else I should consider in the <$400 price range?
I did use steam remote play (I think that’s the name) and it worked just fine with my AMD RX590. The only detail that made me not use it more, is that Xs must be showing the screen (I.e. you cannot have the screen off).
Good to know. I think I had something going with Xvfb, since the NUC is headless, that may have been part of why I got such bad performance.
what you’re describing is what I got when I tried to used with the screen off. Maybe you can try to plug in a screen. I looked into this problem and there are ways to demand Xorg to keep drawing the screen all the time, but I found it hard to achieve and hence overhead for my case
I think the problem is that under Linux only Nvidia GPUs do hardware accelerated streaming with Steam. ~~Last time there was some work ongoing to get it working wth AMD GPUs as well, but I am not sure if that is available yet. ~~ Edit: I guess: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4890
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/hkt13x/poor_performance_in_steam_inhome_streaming/
Oof, it sounds like that puts a pin in the AMD-based system, unless I want to run Windows (I don’t).
Apparently same with Intel GPU based systems. Maybe you can find a small PC where you can add a lower end Nvidia GPU via PCIe?
