Steam has published its latest client update yesterday, which mainly included minor bugfixes and a few new features, but one The addition to Steam’s remote play is a bit odd. Spotted by PC World, Remote Play now supports streaming up to 8K – strange considering that two modern graphics cards actually have the specifications to handle such a high resolution, and 8K TVs can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. It is far from the reach of the average consumer.
If you are not familiar with Remote play, this is one of the main features of Steam which allows users to play any game in their library on another device (iOS, Apple TV, Android phones, etc.) from the Steam Link app as long as their PC is on. The quality of the stream depends in part on the hardware of your platform. So if you only have an RTX 3060 or something similar on your PC and want to stream to your TV in 4K, this graphics card can’t handle 4K streaming unless you turn off the graphics setting in-game, which sort of defeats the 4K streaming point.
Nvidia’s RTX 3090 and AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT are the only mainstream cards on the market that can handle 8K streaming, and even these GPUs can’t hit 60fps in most games with settings. high graphics. Most GPUs can’t even do 4K, at least not at 60 fps on ultra settings.
According to the most recent from Steam material survey, only 0.30% of Nvidia GeForce owners own an RTX 3090, and none of the newer AMD Radeon 6000 series GPUs even appear on the poll. The newest AMD GPU with the most users is the RX 5700 XT at 1.02%. Almost 10% of users still have a GTX 1060 graphics card.
There is also the issue of bandwidth and data consumption. Steam’s remote play works similarly to cloud play, but instead of connecting to an Nvidia or Stadia server, you connect to your own PC. This data is transferred through your home internet connection to your TV, phone or any other device you use to play your game, and the entries you make on your device are transferred back to your PC. It is alot downloading and downloading.
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Streaming games in 4K can take up to 20 GB per hour, according to Stadia. 8K streaming could take twice as much, up to 40GB per hour or 25 hours of playtime for an entire month, assuming no one else is using the same data pool. Is GGood news if you are an ISP with data limits, but bad news if you are someone who has to pay to exceed that data limit. You will also need a minimum download speed of 75-100 Mbps to handle this amount of data going through the pipeline.
8K will become the of resolution of fact for consumers someday, but that day will not come any time soon, thanks to the cost and availability of 8K televisions and graphics cards. There is simply too many barriers to entry right now.