I rarely have trouble streaming games in here. The Link in my office is plugged into my wired network, and so is the desktop computer that runs my games. All Steam streaming traffic stays inside your house. As long as Steam will let you play your game offline, you don’t need the Internet at all. You don’t need a fast Internet connection. That’s enough bandwidth that I don’t often notice serious mpeg artifacts, though you can sometimes see some blocking when a game fires off lots of explosions. Playing games at 1080p just about maxes out the 100-megabit Ethernet connection on the Link. If you’re using a hard-wired connection, you shouldn’t have any trouble. You can stream from one PC to another as long as they are both on your local network and have the Steam client running, but the Link is inexpensive, does its job quite well, and it is easy to hide behind your TV.ĭoes it use a lot of bandwidth? Do I need a fast Internet connection? Steam streaming doesn’t even require a Steam Link. It probably goofs up my Rocket League game a bit, but the additional 10ms of latency usually isn’t something you’ll notice. For the most part, this hasn’t caused me any problems.

Your game controller connects to the Link, and the Link transmits your controller inputs back to your computer.

That stream is sent over your local area network to the Steam Link that’s plugged into your TV. The Steam client on your PC captures your display and encodes that data into an h.264 video stream. I’d have guessed I owned it half as long, but I realized that my recollection is clouded by the fact that I added a second Steam Link to my network just a few months ago.īeing able to stream games from my computer to my televisions has come in handy, and I’ve had a chance to try some controller-based games in my Steam library that I might never have bothered to play on my computer.

It is hard for me to believe that I first wrote about my Steam Link over six months ago.

Steamlink on pc