> PC enthusiasts can get a Steam Link for $50 for most of the benefits of this.
What are the benefits of SteamOS? 1080p is less resolution than a good PC monitor has.. not to mention most graphics cards can straight up use HDMI anyway.
In-home streaming. Lots of gaming PCs are too big and loud to have in the living room, so you can put them in another room and play games on your TV. But the $50 Steam Link does that,you don't need a Steam Machine for it.
Yes, but with in-home streaming you are going to get some slight delay to transmit frames, and while it may be acceptable for some games, it may not be prefered for others where fast reflexes/inputs/screen feedback are needed.
Sorry but gigabytes network simply bring more pixels at once, it does nothing to remove the latency. It's bandwidth, not speed-related. You still get latency. Whether you notice it or not is a totally different issue.
Your wireless game controller probably contributes more to latency than your in home network. Your television almost certainly does.
That said, latency is additive since it all happens in serial, and if the sum of it hits a certain threshold ("human perception") you begin to notice. So maybe you save a few ms from the network with wired vs wireless, or a few ms with a fancy "gamer" controller, or a few ms with a nice gpu-powered video encoding algorithm.
Shave enough of these things (which are only now being designed with this sort of over-engineered latency in mind), and eventually playing over the network is less latency-prone than playing directly on a machine from not that long ago.
Not quite true. Latency is also lower on a gigabit network; it doesn't send more packets in parallel, it sends packets faster, in serial. At any given speed, it takes time for some number of bytes to traverse the wire.
Though the minimum on-wire latency at 100MBit is 0.12ms for 1500-byte packets, per packet, typically 1GBit cards also have lower latency internally.
(You can multiply that 0.12ms number by the number of intervening switches, plus one.)
That depends on the environment - I'm using In-Home streaming extensively on my setup (Living room gaming PC via 802.11ac -> Gigabit network to OS X) and it results in about 25ms of total lag (encode + transmit + decode). Interestingly enough, most lag is added by the video decoder on OS X not the network itself. Meaning, I'm getting about 3-4ms of encoder lag, 2-3ms of network lag and about 18-20ms of decoder lag according to Steam diagnostics.
Strategy, RPG and other mouse controlled games are certanly more than playable in such a setup. Didn't try online FPSes though.
What are the benefits of SteamOS? 1080p is less resolution than a good PC monitor has.. not to mention most graphics cards can straight up use HDMI anyway.