I can finally stream games from my PC to my TV, but it was more trouble than it’s worth

Earlier this year, I moved to a new apartment, and I figured it would be a good opportunity to finally set up my gaming PC to stream to my TV. The technology definitely exists, I reasoned, and I wasn’t going to be dealing with a huge amount of space. I’ll incorporate Steam Link into my new setup, and it’ll work just fine, right?

Wrong. While I eventually managed to stream PC games to my TV, the process involved many more steps than I originally imagined, as well as additional equipment and lowered expectations for the resulting experience. Yes, it works now, but not flawlessly or all that conveniently. It’s not good enough to handle some of my favorite games, and to make it work I have to sacrifice cool features my PC might otherwise be able to use. I’m going to explain what I did, but remember this while I do that: It probably isn’t worth it!

Step one was to set my TV up for PC gaming. Since 2015, Steam has included a feature called Steam Link. Initially, this was a piece of hardware that you could buy from Valve, a slim black box that connected to your TV and linked to your home network either by Wi-Fi or ethernet. Now, you can simply download the Steam Link app to a range of popular streaming devices that can also handle things like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and whatever other apps you use for entertainment.

I decided to use the Nvidia Shield TV, which seemed like a premium option. It has powerful hardware onboard, and I was excited that it included Nvidia GameStream—an extra-fast system that takes advantage of Nvidia GPUs to beam games straight from your PC to your TV.

At least, it used to, before it was discontinued in April. I found out about that part when I brought an Nvidia Shield TV home and started setting it up. Oops.

That was fine, though! I had planned on using the Steam Link app anyway, and that still worked fine, right? Eh, not exactly, as it turned out. Both my PC and Nvidia Shield TV were connected to my home network by Wi-Fi, which limited my data transfer rate. Trying to play this way was effectively impossible: Even with my PC, TV, and router in the same room, Steam Link struggled to maintain a constant connection over Wi-Fi. The action on my TV screen stopped and stuttered, the image looked terrible thanks to all the artifacting, and my controller inputs took seconds to register. This wasn’t going to work.

Valve recommends using a wired connection rather than Wi-Fi to use Steam Link, and so I figured that would be my next move: connecting my PC and Nvidia Shield TV to the router with ethernet cable. I only needed a six-foot length to hook up my PC, and after doing some late-night wall measurements and math, I ordered a 35-foot (10.6 meter) length of cat-8 to run along the baseboards of my living room to the back of the entertainment cabinet that the TV rests on.

Let’s do a little math though. At this point, I’ve gone from thinking my PC will wirelessly connect to my TV automagically to buying and installing:

That’s awfully close to the $271 it would cost to grab a brand new Xbox Series S at Walmart right now, just to keep this project in perspective.

After an evening spent installing the cable hider and ethernet line, I was ready to stretch out on the sofa and fire up some of my favorite Steam games on the big screen. I went with Dark Souls III, and… it was terrible. I would press a button on the controller, and then release it. At that point, my character would begin the animation for the attack or dodge I had wanted him to do. Running and moving the camera was similarly laggy. There was no way I could play this way. Even games less sensitive to lag would still be pretty unplayable with this level of latency.

Fortunately, I had found another option. Rather than using Steam Link, I could install an app called Moonlight on my Nvidia Shield TV. This app links to a piece of open-source software called Sunshine that runs on the PC and turns it into a media server, using the same hardware that Nvidia’s GameStream used to.

I had much better results with Moonlight and Sunshine, although those are another hassle to set up correctly. Once I did, though, I noticed enough reduced latency to at least be able to play slower games like Alan Wake II pretty comfortably. This system also allowed me to run non-Steam games fairly easily, so anything I had on GOG or the Epic Games Store could now run on the TV.

Still, I was pretty disappointed with where all this time and effort had gotten me. This wasn’t a good way to play games, and with my PC in the same room, it would be hard to justify having the laggier, compromised experience just so I could sit on the sofa. I kept looking for ways to improve the responsiveness.

Finally, after a lot of digging around on Reddit, I stumbled across a solution. A few years ago, Windows introduced a new graphics feature called hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. Without getting into technicalities, it’s a way to offload some graphics-related tasks to the dedicated graphics card in the PC, usually resulting in better performance all around. For my purposes, it allows me to use Nvidia’s frame generation technology, which smooths out framerates in games that have that option.

However, this hardware-based scheduling feature isn’t perfect yet, and it turns out that it conflicts with Nvidia’s GameStream technology. As I was looking through the Sunshine documentation on Github, I found that it’ll cause problems for streaming if it’s switched on.

Turning off hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle, and it wound up boosting performance not only for Moonlight and Sunshine, but for Steam Link as well. Performance definitely isn’t as snappy as I’m used to having at my desk, but it’s certainly enough for me to be able to stream PC games like Starfield and Forza Horizon 5 without any real trouble.

I write all this out on the off chance that it’ll help someone who’s run into similar frustrations trying to stream PC games to a TV, but mostly to advise anyone interested in doing something like this to just buy an Xbox instead. This was a hassle that I really don’t think was worth the time or money in the end.