I definately feel the latency on steam link when using remote play. I currently rock a my LCD deck and a wifi 5 router. The question is if I buy an OLED deck and a wifi 6 router will the latency be reduced for remote play?
Only if the current 2.4GHz or 5GHz band you’re using is congested. You usually see a jump from 2.4GHz to 5GHz as a TON of devices use 2.4GHz but less so for 5GHz; you also see a general improvement partially because the signal drops off at a much lower distance and therefore there’s less congestion in the area if you’re in an apartment building.
If you’re getting a solid signal with 5GHz, you won’t likely notice anything. Remote Play won’t be saturating the bandwidth you have available either way. Where you might see a big difference is if your current router is a low-end model and the WiFi 6E router is substantially better at allocating.
Keep in mind, WiFi 6 doesn’t mean 6GHz, it needs to be WiFi 6E. Standard WiFi 6 routers are still using 5GHz.
I’ve done a bunch of testing with the Quest 3 using Virtual Desktop to stream VR games and I’ve had no improvement between 5GHz and 6GHz, the network latency is extremely low for both.
Thanks for the reply this is what I was looking for. I live in a single unit house and my pc is connected via Cat6 Ethernet to my high end wifi 5 router which is no more than 5 meters away from where I game with my steam deck or my TV. So basically I would not experience any improvement.
Do you have any explanation as to why there is latency? It is very subtle both on the deck and tv using remote play. When looking at my pc screen when in remote play the controller input is instant (no latency) but on the remote play screen there is that ever so slight delay.
Usually it’s down to the added time of encoding, network transmission and decoding vs the native experience on the PC. As an example, for my Quest 3 testing I was getting roughly 6ms encoding on the host PC, 7ms network latency, and then 13 ms decoding on the Quest 3. Adding it up, that’s 26ms, or basically a frame and a half of latency at the lowest to stream the remote play video to the device you’re playing on. Having your host PC connected via ethernet gives the best performance so it’s great you’ve done that. There could also be slight added input latency as well. They all are ridiculously fast processes but add up together.
Depending on the client doing the streaming and the video codec used, the efficiency can vary wildly too. Moonlight is one of the best ones out there thankfully but it’s impossible to eliminate the latency entirely.
Maybe a little but I doubt it would be noticeable. Most of the latency usually comes from the internet service provider transfering the data over the internet. At least that’s the case for me. I don’t really notice much of a difference with ping when I’m on wi-fi vs wired.
Well that would be for game streaming. If you’re doing remote play you wouldn’t be leaving your lan.
If you can, try Moonlight and Sunshine. I’ve got horrible latency with remote play but no noticeable latency with those.
Thanks I’ll give it a go. Remote play is just very convenient. My latency isn’t horrible but noticeable.
Wifi 6 should help with worse case latency as it shares the spectrum theoretically better and it has the opportunity to run at 6 GHz which is fairly clean spectrum but the average latency might improve slightly due to faster transfer speeds but not by much.
Doesn’t change much since you are running on your home network and aren’t sending much signals over.
Only usecase I found was remote VR since there’s an absolute shitton of instructions processed at all timesTheoretically yes
Now the question that remains is what about in practice. :D I am not even sure if the majority of the latency of remote play is coming from the transfer of data over lan and WiFi. I think it’s the compressing and uncompressing of the feed (I believe that is going on right?)
You should try out moonlight too if you haven’t . It’s noticeably faster than steam remote play in my experience
If remote play is important to you get a AP and use a separate SSID and unused frequency for remote play. Most wireless latency issues are from band sharing with so many devices. I do that very thing on two dedicated APs. One for 2.4ghz and another for 5ghz. Home wireless is all 6E for everything else.