I'm going to be using a PS4 Pro to do remote play of ps5 games when I get one and the Mrs needs the desk with my monitor on for work/studying. One question if I may, if you hook up the PS4 Pro to a 4K tv and do the PS5 Remote play app, I know that the game stream is limited to 1080p 60fps, but does the PS4 Pro then upscale that feed to 4K?
I have two 4K TVs at home, one in the bedroom and one in my living room. Both have consoles attached. One has aPS4 Pro and one has a Nintendo Switch and both are great.
- Over a 5 GHz network, our target is a resolution of 1080p at 60 frames per second, with good quality for most scenes. If you have a powerful gaming rig, a wired network, and a capable client device, it's possible to stream 4K at 60 FPS. For more information about Steam Remote Play, visit Steam Support.
- With Remote Play, you can control your PlayStation® console remotely wherever you have a high-speed internet connection. Using the PS Remote Play app, you can control your PlayStation®5 console or PlayStation®4 console from a device in a different location.
- In my experience, remote play has never been 100%. If im able to actually connect, the quality is really low and latency is pretty bad. I dont think i've ever been able to have a full session over remote play. To the contrary, xcloud has been amazing, even surprising me at times where i have a not-so-great connection. Have been able to play hours of DayZ via xcloud with virtually no issues.
However, I also have a gaming PC in my office, which is quite powerful compared to any home consoleMine is equipped with a RTX 2080 TI GPU, and a 9900K processor, so it can play pretty much any new game at 4K with a solid 60 fps on high settings.
For any cross platform AAA game, my PC is going to provide a signficantly better experience than the consoles.It can do 4K without upscaling techniques like checkerboard rendering. Also, thanks to a NVMe M.2 SSD,it loads games and levels significantly faster than any home console.
Remote Play Ps5 4k
PC Gaming is a little more janky than console gaming, as there can be things to mess with like device drivers,but given the chance I always prefer it. Having said that, I also work fromhome, and sometimes I want to get out of my office and play games on the couch instead of an office chair.
I briefly considered building a second gaming PC to attach to one of my TVs, but that’s a considerable costjust for the ability to game on my couch or bed. Instead, I decided to try out streaming from my home PC tomy other TVs.
I buy most of my PC games on Steam, and it has a product called Steam Link which allows you to stream games from your PC to other devices.
Apple TV 4K: Setup
I already owned an Apple TV 4K, which as of tvOS 13 allows you to pairgame controllers and supports the Steam Link app. Installing the Steam Link app is quite easy as it’s availablein the App Store, but I did have a little more trouble getting my Xbox One controller to work. tvOS found itand I was quickly able to navigate the menus, but the Steam Link app insited on being taught the buttons on thecontroller. In theory that should have been easy and simply involved pressing each button one at a time, butseveral of the buttons would quit out of the Steam Link app and back to the home screen! Fortunately I found a workaround and was up and running. Afer that, Steam launched quickly and my games worked perfectly.
Apple TV 4K: Performance
The Apple TV initially showed a lot of promise. My games were up and running in seconds in 4K and as I movedthe camera around they sure felt like they were running at 60 frames per second.
Unfortunately, as I started to actually play the games, I got the feeling that something was wrong. I was playingPrey, a first person shooter, and the reticulejust felt off. It was so subtle that I was wondering if I was making it up or if it was something I wasreally experiencing. I lowered the resolution to 1440p and it felt much better and playable.
I tried another game, Resident Evil 2, whichis a 3rd person shooter, and felt similar problems aiming at zombies.
To help debug, I was very happy to see that Steam Link has an option to display a visual overlay with lots ofextra information. While playing Resident Evil 2 in 4K, it reported that it was playing at 60 frames per second, with 1.5ms of input latency and 80ms of display latency.
At 60 frames per second, there should be one frame rendered to screen every 16ms or so. The display latency being 80ms meant I was about 5 frames behind which is not ideal, but the way steam split off display and input latencyimplied to me that it prioritized my input over the display. 1.5ms delay is such a small number that it washard to believe I was noticing anything at all, as it should have been receving my input quite frequently.
Improving my Network: The Overhead of MoCA
At this point I decided to see if there was any way I could lower those numbers. Like most people, I have awireless network, but I have hard wired several points. My Apple TV and computer were connected via Gb Ethernet,which is quite fast.
However, something came to mind about my setup: My TVs were near Coax outlets and had no ethernet jacks.To wire them, I’d set up MoCA adapters.
This meant that for my PC to reach my Apple TV, it had to go from my PC to a Gb switch, then to my router,then into a MoCA adapter in the closet, then through my Coax cables, out into another MoCA adapter, finallyto a switch and then into the Apple TV.
That’s quite a lot of steps! As a test, I pinged my NAS near my router that did not need to go through the MoCAadapters and received a response time of <1ms. Pinging my Apple TV was taking around 3-4ms for the roundtrip, which lines up with the 1.5ms that Steam was reporting. It seems that performing the conversion fromethernet into Coax and back took about 1.5ms each way!
Now I should report for most networks, that’s a perfectly acceptable ping. However, I wanted mystreaming experience to be better, so I thought of ways I might remove them.
I’ve not had a cable subscription for over a decade, so I wondered how challenging it would be to replacemy Coax outlets with ethernet jacks. To do this, I unscrewed the face plates for the Coax outlets, and disconnectedthe cables from the plates. I then went into my closet where they connect to a splitter and pulledslightly. Surprisingly, they moved!
I bought a box of bulk Cat5e, and duct taped one end of the bulk cable to the Coax cable, then pulledfrom the other side. I got a little worried at one point when it jammed, but I pulled harder and it joggedloose and came through. The next part was more challenging for me: I had to attach jacks to each cable.This task is quite challenging as each twisted pair in the ethernet cable has to be weaved into an impossiblysmall area before you punch it down, but it was even harder for me because I’m colourblind. I ended up getting a somewhat crappy app on my phone that I could point at a cableand it would give me a rough idea what colour it was.
After hours of frustration that involved rebuilding and testing the cables over and over, things workedperfectly. I powered everything on, and Steam was reporting less than 1ms of input delay, and my displaylatency had dropped to 65ms.
Another thing I wondered was whether the switches were adding latency. I experimented with 1 switch instead of2 and even a direct connection and noticed no measuable difference. Any overhead added by a switch did notseem to matter in my experiments.
Apple TV: Gigabit Performance
Drivers motorola port devices. I did immediately notice an improvement with the better input and display latency. Things were now much moreplayable than before. However, I’d already made some progress at improving those numbers and I wasn’t out ofideas! The display latency was still quite high, and I couldn’t help but think the AppleTV was not the idealdevice for doing this.
To test my theory, I connected my laptop to the same network port. My laptop does not have ethernet, so Ihad to use a USB-C ethernet adapter. When I started up Steam I had better results! Input latency was thesame but the display latency dropped from 65ms to 55ms. This was surprising indeed because I have alwaysheard that USB ethernet cards are quite bad. I decided to investigate alternatives to the Apple TV.
nVidia Shield TV Pro: Setup
On paper, the nVidia Shield TV Pro is not much better than an AppleTV. Both have 3GB of RAM, and in this CPU benchmark I found the AppleTV processor seems superior. Still, I decided to give it a go.
The setup was quite good. It’s an Android TV device and I find the overall UX not as polished as tvOS, butdefinitely not unpleasant. It paired with my Xbox One controller right away and the Steam Link apphad no issue using it without the annoying button configuration I had to do on the Apple TV.
Without any changes to the base configuration, I was streaming at 4K with sub-1ms input latency and 45msdisplay latency - the best results I’d seen to date.
I was able to improve things even further after experimenting with the settings. I’d turned on HEVC streamingbecause on the AppleTV I noticed a minor improvement. However, on the shield I found that by disablingHEVC, my display latency dropped into the 35-40ms range.
With these numbers, not only were all my games playable at 40k@60, but I couldn’t notice any lagwhatsoever. I’d found my perfect setup. Since then I’ve put in over a dozen hours of streaming variouskinds of games and it works like a dream.
Moonlight
Update Nov 26, 2020: I’ve since found that Moonlight Game Streamingworks better than Steam’s streaming, and has the benefit of being able to stream games that come fromother stores than Steam.
I now recommend running nVidia’s streaming with Moonlight as a client. It can do 4k@60Hz for any gamewith no noticeable lag.
TL;DR
- The best setup for in-home 4K, 60fps game streaming is a gigabit wired ethernet with an nVidia Shield TV
- Do whatever you can to minimize the ping time between your PC and streaming device
- Use nVidia’s streaming to Moonlight.
Sony has updated the PS5 Remote Play app, preparing it for the PS5’s launch and it has revealed that you will be able to remote play from your PS5, with HDR on, providing you have a compatible screen.
An eagle-eyed user on Reddit spotted the option when browsing through the updated application. In order to play PS5 games through Remote Play with HDR, your display will need to be HDR enabled, have the HVEC Video Extension installed from Microsoft, and turn on “Play HDR games and apps” in your Windows Settings. But, if that criteria is met you should be good to go when the PS5 launches.
This HDR support is great news for those who make a lot of use out of Remote Play and ensures they can get the best possible experience whilst streaming. Remote Play was officially confirmed and set up today with PS4 firmware update 8.00 being released.
The PS5 releases on November 12, 2020, in the US and November 19, 2020, in the EU and UK.
Remote Play Keyboard Controls
Source – [Reddit]