Steam introduces: Steam Broadcasting

It seems to depend on the game, it seems. As I said earlier, I was running GW2 (which isn’t even a Steam game) without much issue, but it made Skyrim unplayable due to input lag - but the output stream was apparently watchable and neither suffered frame rate drops.

Yeah, that’s definitely true. I streamed war thunder with no noticible input lag or choppiness of any sort - I wouldn’t have even known I was streaming except for the live counter in the corner. Wreckfest made it significantly jerky with impacted controls. Far Cry 3 was very slightly noticible as a choppiness but didn’t affect gameplay at all.

I wonder if it has to do with whether the game is GPU or CPU bound. That’s a decent guess. I don’t have any monitoring tools running to see if that’s the case.

Even when it feels choppy, the actual frame rate as measured by the GFE tool doesn’t seem to go down. I don’t know what that means - if that’s what they call microstutter or what.

So, I thought one good thing about this system would be that you could watch someone playing a game that you were interested in, to see if it worked. But it seems, at this early stage at least, that even people who are openly broadcasting (ie, that aren’t on my friends list) tend to turn off their broadcasts about 20 seconds or so after I start watching. Maybe it’s because it’s impacting their game, or maybe they get suddenly shy once they know someone is watching, but I haven’t actually been able to sit and watch anyone play anything for any length of time.

Sorry for double post, but I’ve just discovered that when you broadcast, you broadcast sound as well. And not only the sound from your game, but it seems whatever is happening on your audio device. I just watched a bit of someone playing This War Of Mine, and they were having a Skype call which also came through!