Steam Will Let You Stream Video games in 8K

Steam launched its newest shopper replace yesterday, which principally included minor bug fixes and and a few new options, however one addition to Steam’s Distant Play is a bit curious. Noticed by PCWorld, Distant Play will now assist as much as 8K streaming—odd contemplating simply two fashionable graphics playing cards even have the specs to deal with such a excessive decision, and 8K TVs can value hundreds or tens of hundreds of {dollars}. That is far out of attain for the typical client.

In the event you’re not accustomed to Distant Play, it’s considered one of Steam’s core options that lets customers play any recreation of their library on one other machine (iOS, Apple TV, Android telephones, and so forth.) from the Steam Hyperlink app so long as their PC is turned on. The stream high quality is partially depending on the {hardware} that’s in your rig. So if you happen to solely have an RTX 3060 or one thing related in your PC and wish to stream to your TV at 4K, that graphics card can’t deal with streaming at 4K except you flip the graphics setting down within the recreation, which type of defeats the purpose of 4K streaming.

Nvidia’s RTX 3090 and AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT are the one client playing cards in the marketplace that may deal with 8K streaming, and even these GPUs can’t attain 60 frames per second in most video games with the graphics setting on excessive. Most GPUs can’t even do 4K, no less than not at 60 fps on extremely settings.

Based on Steam’s most up-to-date {hardware} survey, solely 0.30% of Nvidia GeForce house owners have an RTX 3090, and not one of the new AMD Radeon 6000-series GPUs even present up on the survey. The latest AMD GPU with probably the most customers is the RX 5700 XT at 1.02%. Near 10% of customers nonetheless have a GTX 1060 graphics card.

There’s additionally the difficulty of bandwidth and knowledge consumption. Steam’s Distant Play works much like cloud gaming, however as a substitute of connecting to an Nvidia or Stadia server, you’re connecting to your individual PC. That knowledge is transferred over your private home web connection to your TV, cellphone, or no matter machine you’re utilizing to play your recreation, and the inputs you make in your machine are transferred again to your PC. That’s a lot of downloading and importing occurring.

Streaming video games in 4K can take up as a lot as 20GB an hour, in response to Stadia. 8K streaming might take up twice as a lot, as much as 40GB an hour or 25 hours of gaming for a whole month, assuming nobody else is utilizing the identical knowledge pool. That’s good information if you happen to’re an ISP with knowledge caps, however unhealthy information if you happen to’re somebody who has to pay for going over that knowledge cap. You’ll additionally want someplace within the neighborhood of a minimal 75-100Mbps obtain velocity to deal with that quantity of information coming by means of the pipeline.

8K will develop into the de facto decision for customers someday, however that day received’t come any time quickly, because of the associated fee and availability of 8K TVs and graphics playing cards. There are merely too many limitations to entry proper now.