Steam Link is magic

Monday, 26 January 2026 11:37

I unexpectedly received an ROG Xbox Ally X handheld for Christmas (thanks, Magdalena!) and I pretty much switched to gaming on that exclusively. This article isn’t a review of the handheld, but instead focuses on something I pretty much ignored until now: you can stream games between devices on a local network and the experience is fantastic. It really feels like magic.

I’m playing “Avowed” ¹ on the Xbox Ally X right now. This is a new game, one of the first releases using Unreal Engine 5. You could either say it’s not very well optimized, or that it set a high bar for even its lowest quality settings, so it could look as good as it does. However you look at it, though, the result is that the handheld itself would only allow it to run at playable framerates (approaching 60 FPS) on low quality graphics settings and with FSR upscaling (i.e. it’s actually rendered at 720p and upscaled by 1.5x to 1080p). I didn’t want that since the game’s considered very pretty, would be a bummer to compromise that.

So I set up to stream the game from my big boy PC with an RTX 3090. That allowed me to max out all the details all the way to “Epic” levels and actually only use DLAA, which is the convolutional neural network anti-aliasing at full resolution (no upscaling!). So it’s kind of the best looking 1080p you can get.

Here’s how the game looks like rendered natively on the Z2 Extreme APU with low details:

And here’s a screenshot of the same save (so at the same in-game moment) taken on the handheld while streaming the game from the big PC. I enabled Steam’s streaming stats (hidden by default) so you can see some performance numbers as well. But before we get to discussing performance, let’s talk quality.

Streaming looks amazing

By default, Steam chooses rather conservative video encoding settings. After you tweak that (discussed below), the results are stunning. Here’s another screenshot of the game rendered natively. To be clear, I still find it incredible that a battery-powered handheld can render this sort of thing at playable framerates. But if you open it full size you’l notice typical shimmery artifacts from upscaling on the water, and you’ll see the shadows in particular are harsh and pixelated.

If you compare that to streaming from my RTX 3090 with maxed out details, you’ll notice that water looks more convincing: the bridge and the sky between the planks clearly reflect in the water. There’s also a few more objects here and there in the scene. Shadows are more realistic and gradual.

Clearly, the game rendered at “epic” details with raytracing looks better than native, even when streamed through a lossy video codec! At the same time, the physical size of the handheld screen is barely 7”. With a resolution of 1920x1080 this means the pixel density is over 314pp, which beats even Retina screens of iPads and Macbook Pros. That means that even at the lowest level of detail, “Avowed” is perfectly enjoyable and pretty. So while I’m continuing to default to streaming heavier titles, doing this comparison gave me some confidence that this silly handheld can actually satisfactorily pull off even new AAA games.

In fact, besides the upscaling artifacts, the only really visible drawback of low details are choppy pixelated shadows. You can bump those to “medium” quality sacrificing like 10-15 FPS and then, while the rendering still looks different from raytraced “epic” details, the experience is no longer distracting.

Optimizing handheld streaming

As I mentioned, the default streaming behaviour wasn’t all that great, though. For compatibility reasons, Steam defaults to the older H.264 codec and a “Balanced” quality preset. That codec is not super efficient in terms of compression, so to minimize bandwidth the encoding process uses a pretty low bitrate, and the resulting quality is pretty visibly lossy.

This is mostly noticeable in two ways: rapid motion creates “pixelated” blurry artifacts, and subtle color gradients turn into visibly choppy bands. And if your networking is bad and even that level of quality is too much bandwidth to ask of your wifi, then you can switch to the “Fast” quality preset, but then the artifacts and the banding get pretty distracting. You’ll notice text and UI elements having “bad JPEG” compression artifacts. And the banding starts to move, so the sky looks like it’s boiling.

I wanted none of that, so I pleasantly wasted some stupid amount of time finetuning the streaming experience with the Xbox Ally X. It started out because I noticed that audio every now and then would mangle for a little bit (repeating a short loop a few times and then “catching up” skipping some content). I turned on the performance stats display you’ve seen in the first screenshot and I noticed relatively frequent spikes of latency over 100ms, which yeah, that’s longer than the audio buffer.

So first I enabled the HEVC codec and that noticeably helped but didn’t eliminate occasional spikes. So I needed to try something else. First, I wanted to test whether this works the same with a wired Ethernet connection. That would prove the problem is wifi and not some bug on the PC or the handheld. The Xbox Ally X understandably doesn’t have an Ethernet port, and the only dongle I had was USB-A. I found a dongle for that, too, but it turned out the Apple USB Ethernet dongle isn’t easy to get working on Windows 11. ² And after solving that I realized that the dongle is only 100mbps. Fortunately, it turns out the stream doesn’t actually saturate 100mbps, so it ended up working just fine. No spikes, no latency spikes. Success!

After confirming the wired connection was flawless, I could have kept streaming games using Ethernet, but being tethered to a cable again felt dumb and all that dongle business was really not confidence inducing either. So I had to improve the streaming situation with wifi. First of all, I changed my network’s 5GHz channel to use a 80MHz DFS band, which should be clean of interference with other radio around me. Then on the handheld I disabled “power saving” on the Mediatek wifi driver in Windows 11, which the Microsoft Learn forums found had a pretty aggressive energy saving curve.

And the combination of those two changes amazingly really helped! I no longer see spikes anywhere close to 100ms, the streaming latency is consistently below 15ms, and the metric of “frame loss” is now near zero. Note that at 60 FPS it already takes 16.67ms to render a single frame, so not even doubling that means I’m getting responsiveness comparable with gaming locally at >30FPS, but with smoother graphics. The ping to the streaming host is now also consistently less than 3ms while it was over 10ms before. Sure, wired is under a 1ms, but again, using a handheld on a cable makes the entire thing somewhat pointless.

Let me also make one point clear. The PC that is the streaming host is connected via gigabit Ethernet to the local network. That network is a fully managed industrial-grade Ubiquiti installation with a number of gigabit switches with Power-over-Ethernet scattered around the house, as well as a few 5GHz access points around the house for wifi set up in a meshed network. I mention this, because I don’t think it’s easy (if at all possible) to get good results when both the streaming host and the streaming client are using wireless connections. And cheap all-in-one Internet routers with wifi provided by ISPs might behave worse even if both ends of the streaming are connected by wire. Essentially, YMMV.

Streaming for godlike battery life

While the Xbox Ally X is capable of running “Avowed” locally with acceptable performance and looking good to boot, that can only be achieved at the “Performance” or “Turbo” TDP ³ presets. On that setting, you can expect maybe 2 hours of use on a single battery charge, and there’s some audible fan noise (not deal breaking, but noticeable). When you put the hand to the top of the device, you’ll feel the heat it’s venting. You can select the “Silent” TDP preset to help with those things, but that sacrifices performance further.

On the other hand, when streaming you are only decoding realtime video on the handheld, which is done in hardware and therefore very efficient. The GPU is otherwise dormant, and so is most of the CPU, because it only handles the operating system and controls. The game itself runs on the remote PC. In effect, the handheld barely uses any power. In this case you can easily switch it to the “Silent” TDP preset without sacrificing the experience. “Silent” mode is advertised as 13W, but since streaming is so light on resources, the actual power draw oscillates between just 4W-5W. As a result, you can play for like 8 hours on a single charge. And there’s no discernible heat being emitted from the vents the entire time, and the device stays quiet.

Finally, funnily enough, streaming might actually mean you are in fact saving on electricity as well compared to playing on the PC directly. You see, a typical full-size PC display will draw no less than 15W at even the most forgiving scenarios (OLED with dark content, 1080p at 60Hz). When you replace that with your handheld at a mere 5W, you’re net positive! This is assuming your home networking equipment would be turned on either way. Of course, power saving isn’t really the point here, but it’s a funny realization nonetheless. ⁴

4K comparison

I’m not a hardcore gamer, as you can probably tell from me being entirely happy with console-level 30FPS-ish input latency. I very rarely play multiplayer games and mostly suck at them anyway. So before getting the handheld, I was a pretty happy camper gaming on the PC directly. Since it’s set up pretty far from my desk, I have an optical DisplayPort cable between the monitor and the computer. And then I can use either my Xbox One controller via Bluetooth. ⁵ In return, that lets me experience games in 4K on a 27” screen. No regrets there, games like “Cyberpunk 2077” or “Horizon: Zero Dawn” are just unbelievably gorgeous visually, on top of being amazing experiences.

After some time with “Avowed” on the handheld, I started wondering whether I’m compromising this optimal visual experience by looking at a dim 7” LCD screen at 1080p. So I retreaded some of the game playing locally on the PC in 4K with maxed out details and DLAA (no upscaling) to decide if I should switch back. To be clear, RTX 3090 can barely deliver 20-25 FPS in that configuration, but I was interested in maxing out the eye candy to help me decide if the quality difference is worth it.

Long story short, despite 4K looking amazing AF, I feel like it’s fundamentally a similar enough experience that I prefer the casual nature of the handheld. I’m not tied to the desk. I like being able to move around with the handheld, lie on the couch or stand up and grab a drink with it while clicking through a dialogue tree or watching a cutscene.

A large screen is definitely more immersive, as my 27” display is almost 4x wider and 4x taller than the handheld’s screen. And while the PC wouldn’t be able to keep up with rendering 4K natively, with DLSS Quality it upscales from 1440p so that’s still more detail available to work with than native lossless 1080p, right? But since you don’t look at a 27” display from the same distance as a 7” screen, the experience in real life isn’t actually as different as I would expect.

Of course, with 4K output you can do some pixel peeping and the game looks simply incredible. Here’s the same “under the bridge” scene you’ve seen before, but now in 4K.

It looks gorgeous, love the water in particular, nearing photorealistic. You can tell there’s more detail in the scene, it’s sharper where it counts but also the shadows scatter in a smoother and more realistic way. But seeing both at thumbnail size or with your screen small enough or far enough from your eyes, you’d be forgiven not noticing which one is “better” right away. Hell, even the handheld’s low-detail output looks great.

Three more examples at 4K that I find particularly compelling:

Unexpected win: Apple TV game station

All my fiddling with Steam Link quality and network configuration ended up paying off in a different way, too. I can now stream from the same PC to the living room using a first-gen AppleTV 4K box hooked up to an Optoma HZ40 laser projector. I already had the AppleTV connected via Ethernet, so there’s zero network issues. The projector itself runs natively at 1080p, just like the handheld, so I don’t need to make any changes to graphics settings in games. Just connect your Xbox controller via Bluetooth to the AppleTV and you can play any Steam game on a big screen. Wonderful!

I haven’t measured it, so I can’t give you any numbers, but I noticed that the perceived input latency is higher in this use case compared to streaming with the Xbox Ally X even via wifi. To be clear, it’s still perfectly usable, but after 50+ hours with the game, I can tell that the controls feel a little “spongy”. I suspect I can blame that in part on the projector’s own latency, and part is likely due to Bluetooth controls. And who knows, maybe the Steam Link app running on tvOS faces some additional challenges. All I know is that it’s not because the AppleTV is too slow: the box supports hardware HEVC decoding, which the Steam Link app successfully recognizes and uses.

In any case, for a casual session of single player games that don’t rely too much on control precision, this is more than good enough. As it is for multiplayer sessions with the family gathered around one screen. Perfectly serviceable. Probably less so for online competitive multiplayer titles.

Drawbacks

If all this sounds too good to be true then yeah, there’s some drawbacks. I’m willing to compromise on those things given the utility streaming gives me, but it’s worth knowing about the other side of the coin, too.

Banding

First off, even when everything works as intended, you might notice the video compression color banding. What is that? Well, making video efficient enough to stream in real time is a fascinating subject and there’s many clever tricks codecs do to minimize the amount of data you need to transfer for smooth motion. One of those efficiency things is color quantization. Colors that are really close to each other are grouped into fewer but less similar colors. So instead of a nice smooth gradient you can see steps of coarser color changes. This is especially visible on large flat areas like the sky.

Interestingly, the quantization matrices in the hardware codecs are tuned towards psychovisual perception so most quantization happens near absolute black and absolute white where in many viewing conditions and on many displays the effect will be least visible. But it is still visible. This is one case where streaming from the powerful PC looks worse than native rendering on the handheld. You can see the effect in the sky of the first streaming screenshot. Here’s a 2X close-up below. Native on the left (no issue), streaming on the right (banding). ⁶

As I mentioned before, by default Steam uses the older H.264 codec and a “Balanced” quality preset where banding is even worse of a problem. That’s why I recommend switching to HEVC as long as your streaming host supports it in hardware (which it most likely does if it’s not older than 7-8 years), especially that it’s also more efficient so it should literally perform better. All streaming screenshots in this article are on HEVC with the “Beautiful” quality preset.

Steam also supports a newer codec called AV1 that is even more space efficient and so allows for even better quality at the same bandwidth constraints. Sadly, I can’t test that one at all as my RTX 3090 doesn’t support it in hardware and Steam ignores my attempts at disabling hardware encoding in the settings. I suspect it’s because even my beefy Ryzen 9 7950X wouldn’t be able to encode AV1 in real time at 60FPS with a quality preset set high enough to look better HEVC. It’s a bit of a bummer because of AV1 has a super smart technique – developed by Netflix, by the way! – of stripping “film grain” (i.e. noise) from the input and re-applying it synthetically on the output side. This should greatly improve banding as a common way to work around that particular issue is to introduce some noise into gradients. Too bad, especially that Z2 Extreme on the handheld supports AV1 decoding in hardware just fine.

Anyway, interestingly (to me, haha) the banding looks worse on the actual handheld with an old-style IPS LCD compared to looking at a screenshot of the same content on my Macbook’s mini-LED screen. That’s because on the Macbook black is black whereas on the handheld’s LCD the backlight bleeds through, so “black” is dark grey. That’s especially visible in complete darkness. I didn’t notice banding on the laser projector in the living room, though. I guess there’s just less contrast?

To be clear, it’s not a deal breaker. In motion the banding isn’t that perceptible and mostly affects areas that you’re not looking at directly anyway when playing, whereas the entire scene looks better thanks to the more detailed models, more realistic lighting, gorgeous reflections, water, and so on. And it does it at 60 FPS where native rendering without pixelated shadows would net me around 40-45 FPS, so streaming is a smoother experience, too.

Radio is radio

If you’re looking for a flawless experience 100% of the time, streaming won’t provide that wirelessly. People are moving around your house, and their devices with them. They open and close doors. Neighbor wifi networks can switch channels. Radar affects 5GHz. Poorly shielded USB3 devices affect wifi. All this can create momentary disturbances in wireless communications. That doesn’t affect regular media consumption as the radio just sends the data again, you never notice. But with low-latency communication where every millisecond counts, you might. The practical result for me is that I still occasionally get some transient stuttering, but that happens at most once a day when relatively stationary.

It’s a different story when I make a larger stroll around the house, because then I’m a moving target for the access points. They’re not always able to keep up with my movement, and when the network switches the handheld between access points in the mesh, some data gets lost. That’s just wifi. The only reason Netflix streaming doesn’t appear to have this problem is that it’s got several seconds worth of content buffered upfront. And since you can’t affect the video you’re watching, the data is known in advance, so your phone can download stuff ahead. Game streaming is different by definition: it’s live, so there is no future data you can download ahead, and it must be low-latency for your input to influence the video with as little delay as possible. So even short wifi disturbances cannot be smoothed over.

Fortunately, in practice the stream recovers real quick after I stop moving. And even if you get entirely disconnected for whatever reason, that doesn’t kill the game. It’s still running on the remote PC and waiting for you to reconnect. You can literally restart the entire handheld, run Steam again, select “Connect”, and continue where you were interrupted.

Where is my window?

Every now and then you start streaming and the streaming window on the Xbox Ally isn’t bubbling up to show up on top of other windows in full screen. You need to find it among other windows and manually focus into it.

Every now and then you start streaming and on the remote end the host steals focus, because a notification popped up or an update dialog popped up, and so on. Most of the time you’ll see it in front of the game’s screen so you can interact with it from the handheld to make it go away. No problem. But occasionally streaming won’t pick it up, so you’re looking at a game screen, but the controls don’t seem to do anything. You go to the host, turn on the display and see there’s a dialog you need to click away.

Oh, and when you lock your Windows desktop (Win+L) then Steam sometimes wants you to authenticate physically from the computer, and not via network. In this case, you might know the password, but it won’t let you unlock the screen remotely from the handheld. But other times you can enter the password and the screen unlocks remotely without a hitch. I can’t seem to find any pattern behind this behaviour.

Graphics settings

It doesn’t seem like games allow you to set different graphics settings for local play and remote streaming. So if you play a game sometimes locally, and you want to also sometimes stream it from the same computer, you will have to fiddle with graphics settings every time you switch and change them separately one by one.

Like, I might want to play a game locally in 4K DLSS Quality with some graphics quality settings turned down but stream using 1080p DLAA with maxed out quality. Or, I might want to bump the font size in the UI for streaming with a small screen, but I want the text small when playing locally. Or, I might want to set different gamma settings for the handheld display and different for the big display.

Be sure to stop the remote game

If you disconnect from the streaming host without quitting the game, it will continue running remotely. So don’t just press the power button on the handheld. Also, don’t just close the streaming window. You need to quit the game from its main menu.

By the way, when you leave a game running like that, Steam still treats it as an active game on your account. If you then try to start a different game directly on the handheld, Steam will warn you that this will disconnect the other game from Steam. That means that any unsaved progress won’t sync to cloud saves after that.

It’s a good idea to stop the game entirely anyway since many big titles behave in weird ways if kept running for too long.

Other thoughts

Streaming doesn’t need a powerful handheld

The Z2 Extreme chip inside the Xbox Ally X is a pretty solid evolution over the previous generations. Some reviews complained of “only 15% gains” over the Z1 Extreme, but they missed that the biggest focus of this upgrade was better performance at lower TDP settings. And indeed most 3D games I tried locally on the handheld work surprisingly okay even in the “Silent” TDP present, which is just a 13W sustained power limit (meaning it can jump above that for short spurts of activity).

This got me thinking that for the purpose of local streaming, a cheaper handheld would work just as well. In fact, if you can “fall back to streaming” for Windows games, your handheld of choice could very well be a Linux-based device without compromising game availability. Run what you can on Linux, and stream the other stuff.

Hell, I didn’t test latency and stability of Android-based Arm handhelds, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t perform just as well for the purpose. I mean, those ones usually sport even smaller screens, which might be going too far… but when price becomes part of the equation, I can see how some people might be willing to compromise.

And even looking at the other Xbox Ally: the base white model is over 40% cheaper compared to the big boy X. So if you’re already sporting a powerful PC that you could set up streaming from, getting the cheaper model might be a good way to eat the cake and have it, too.

Non-gaming streaming

I remember the old days of VNC ⁷ and even with the limitations and general jankiness of that technology, it enabled businesses I worked for to do things that would have otherwise been impossible. It could be pretty frugal in terms of required bandwidth, making it operable even through old-style GPRS cell connections. (Not comfortably, mind you, but it did work.) More than one client could be connected at a time, making collaboration possible. Client software could be entirely independent of the server software, meaning they not only didn’t have to share a vendor, but could also run on different operating systems. And while servers could support more fancy encoding formats, the basic scanline protocol allowed for next to trivial snapshotting of remote screen content.

But there were many problems. And it seems to me like remote desktops via hardware-accelerated video streaming could very well provide a modern replacement for that while staying platform independent. Of course, Steam Link is not that, it is very much game focused and while you can trick the streaming host to display a desktop after starting a game, this is clearly not the intended use case for it.

Docking an Xbox Ally with the ROG XG Mobile

Turns out ASUS makes an eGPU Thunderbolt 5 dock. It comes with either the RTX 5090 Mobile GPU (24GB VRAM, graphics processor identical to the desktop RTX 5070 Ti 12GB) or a RTX 5070 Ti Mobile (12GB VRAM, graphics processor identical to the desktop RTX 5070). The 5090 Mobile variant costs $2500, though, and it wouldn’t even result in better performance for the Xbox Ally X because the handheld only supports Thunderbolt 4 (USB4 40Gbps), and not Thunderbolt 5 (USB4 80Gbps) that would be needed to achieve full performance. The 5070 Ti Mobile variant is half the price, which is still expensive for what it is, but looks like a more reasonable choice.

Would that be better than streaming? The idea of the dock looks interesting. You connect it to the Xbox Ally X with a single TB4 cable, which both powers it and transfers data. The dock is additionally equipped with one Thunderbolt 5 port, two USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) Type-A ports, HDMI 2.1, DP 2.1, 5G Ethernet, and a built-in power source with the standard PC power connector. When folded, the dock is real small, so it’s potentially luggable, although I’m not sure how that would be useful. Apparently the dock’s eGPU is able to output back to the Xbox Ally X screen as some Reddit poster claimed. And even without the internal screen support, the dock could still be an alternative to a power adapter + Ethernet dongle + HDMI dongle sort of combo, I guess.

According to Retro Game Corps, Xbox Ally X with the 5070 Ti dock can run games at 4K with medium details where the handheld alone can only do 1080p with low details. That’s a pretty meaningful jump. At the same time, TechPowerUp lists even the 5090 Mobile as slower than my current desktop RTX 3090 (i.e. if 5090 is 100% then 3090 is 118%). Part of why that might be is because they assume the laptop TDP of 95W whereas ASUS can drive that same chip harder in the dock since it doesn’t have to operate on battery. But given the dock dimensions and cooling solution, there’s no way they would dial it all the way up to the desktop 5070 Ti’s 300W, though, that’s for sure.

For completion’s sake, TechPowerUp says the 5070 Ti Mobile is in turn even 1.5X slower than the 5090 Mobile chip (if 5070 Ti is 100% then 3090 is 178%). So for raw gaming performance, it might very well be that my current strategy of streaming from an RTX 3090-powered desktop is a better choice. Sure, the RTX 50 series include hardware FP8 support and with that the much better DLSS 4.5, but since we’re only talking about 1080p rendering, for now at least RTX 3090 is able to pull that off with maxed-out details without DLSS entirely.

Additionally, neither the 5070 nor the 5090 variants of the docks are even available for purchase currently, sold out everywhere. That’s likely because they will have to become even more expensive due to the AI-driven memory price increases. So streaming from the RTX 3090 is what I’ll continue doing.

Did you know?

Random shit I learned while researching all this:

• Steam Link was originally a hardware product
• there’s some progress on reverse-engineering the protocol
• Steam Link runs on Raspberry Pi 3 as well and with Raspberry Pi 4 you can even use hardware HEVC decoding
• Steam Link can wake a sleeping streaming host with Wake-on-LAN configured in the BIOS
• like with VNC, it is possible for more than one player to remotely connect to the same streamed hosted game, which allows for local multiplayer with a shared screen
• while it makes little sense, you can in fact make your handheld a streaming host and use a different device to play on it 😂

#Lifestyle