Hands-on: Steam Link is essentially gaming’s Chromecast

The Steam Link is an intriguing piece of hardware. Much like Google's Chromecast, it acts as the middleman between your computer and your TV screen. However, where visual delay isn't a problem when casting videos through Chromecast, it could potentially be problematic when streaming games that require twitch reactions.

On a whim, I decided to head to my local game store and purchase both the Steam Link and Steam Controller, you know, for science! If you want to know a little more about the controller, you can head on over to our hands-on impressions right here, but in this article, I'm going to focus on the Steam Link.

No I've read a bunch of Steam Link impressions which lead me to believe that your mileage may vary based on your setup at home, your computer specs, your home network, etc. What I can give you is a recount of my personal experience, even if it might be different from some of the others.

My computer isn't really top of the line, but it's well above average. I'm rocking a Nvidia GTX 970, 12GB of Ram, and an i5 quad core processor.

Initial Setup is a breeze

First impressions are extremely important, and thankfully Steam Link makes a really good one. Upon plugging it into my TV, and hardwiring it to my router, it instantly started an update, and upon finishing, immediately found my computer. Once the two are connected, you only need to press the middle button on your controller, whether it's the Steam icon on your Steam Controller, or the Guide Button on an Xbox 360 controller, it will immediately pull up Big Picture mode, as long as you have Steam running on your computer.

The Steam Link does support bluetooth controllers as well, which means the DualShock 4 should work with it, however, I haven't tested this. My entire experience will be based off using the Steam Controller.

The microconsole itself looks rather elegant, and has just the right amount of ports you'd need; Ethernet for hardwiring, two USB ports on the back and one on the side, and an HDMI port.

It's after the initial setup that things got a bit more involved, on both the Steam Link and my PC.

Doesn't play nice with 16:10 monitors, or dual monitor setups for that matter

Once the Steam Link was set up, it was time to put it to the test. Unfortunately, my next few hours were spent figuring out why games weren't filling up my entire screen, or why their performance was suffering, even though they played just fine on my monitor. Turns out, my 16:10 monitor was the source of the problems.

This is because the Steam Link only outputs in 16:9 formats, either 720p or 1080p. For some reason, games were getting scaled down to 1780×1080 and were scaling down the picture so it never filled my entire screen. There were a few solutions for this, but those ended up messing up my experience even more.

One solution was to make the games Windowed. For some reason, the odd resolution went away, and now games were showing up across the entire screen. The problem then was that framerates were lower, and most of the time I couldn't get back into Steam because the middle button wouldn't function anymore.

My second solution was to actually change the resolution on my monitor itself, meaning I'd have black bars on the top and bottom of my screen, but at least the games would be outputting natively on my TV. While this solution worked for the most part, things started to fall apart once again when I wanted to go back to Steam. The picture would freeze on my TV, even though everything was fine on my monitor.

Obviously, the monitor ratio was the source of the problem. Now I know many of you will cringe, but my second monitor is actually a 16:9. Yes… I have two different sized monitors. In any case, I disabled my first monitor and made the 16:9 one my primary, and that not only fixed and UI issues I had, it actually improved the games' framerate. Eureka!

Sound delay

My next issue came with game sound. Sadly, this is something I was unable to solve and it still persists, but given how many people have posted about this issue already, I'm glad I wasn't the only one experiencing it.

Audio seems to have a noticeable delay, which is even more evident in genres like FPS. Whenever I would shoot a gun, the sound would fire off a second after. It was awkward to say the least. My setup includes a soundbar on my TV, which I thought was the cause of the delay, but even unplugging it and running the sound through my TV didn't fix it.

I'm hoping that since a lot of users seem to be having sound issues, Valve might be able to work on a patch to fix it, or at least some sort of settings to improve it.

Frequent crashes ruin the living room experience

Once I had my monitor resolution issues resolved and gave up on my audio sync issues, the next slight annoyance was that Steam would occasionally crash during different instances. Sometimes it was right after starting a freshly installed game. Other times it was after exiting a game. I'm not sure whether this was a local issue, or whether it was in relation to the Steam Link, but it was annoying to have to keep going to my PC to manually restart Steam.

One size does not fit all

The Steam Link has in-home broadcasting settings that need to be tweaked from time to time. I found that some games had a hard time streaming at a constant 60fps when I had my settings set to Beautiful, and had to switch them to Fast. While that slightly degrades the overall stream quality, it greatly improves the framerate. Tweaking these settings is a must if you're experiencing framerate issues when streaming.

However, sometimes it just requires you to tweak the settings in game. While my computer could run Lichdom: Battlemage at max settings flawlessly, it didn't translate to the Stream. Once changing the settings to High from Very High, the framerate shot up to 60 on my TV, and without much noticeable difference in quality.

So what about the games?

I know, I spent most of this article talking about my experience with making this thing work as intended. I can say though that after about five hours of tinkering with it, and without the help of the internet mind you, I got it running rather flawlessly (though that damn audio issue still persists).

The games I tested were Lichdom: Battlemage, Left 4 Dead 2, Torchlight 2, Dirt 3, DuckTales Remastered, Dishonored, Jet Set Radio and 10,000,000. I went with a bunch of different genres, mostly to test out the Steam Controller's ability to adapt to them, especially to games that don't support gamepad controls.

The visual and input lag seemed virtually non-existent. I say virtually because it's definitely there, but it's so minimal (at least in my case) that it's almost unnoticeable. That's great news for games like DuckTales Remastered, which would normally suffer from input lag since it requires some precise platforming.

Other games performed just as well. Jet Set Radio apparently can't play above 30 frames, which is a shame, but the virtually nonexistent input lag meant I was able to pull off the infinite grind trick in the first level with ease. Games normally not suited for gamepad play like 10,000,000, which actually played very well using the Steam Controller.

The Steam Link also organizes games by controller support, which is nice, but it's not fully fleshed out yet. Apparently it doesn't include games that include 'partial controller support' which isn't an issue when you're using a Steam Controller. You're honestly better off organizing your own category with gamepad compatible games at this point.

Do I really need the Steam Controller?

The obvious answer here is 'no' if you already know which games you own have controller support. The interface can easily be controlled using an Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller if you have any of those. The bigger problem stems from games that have launchers.

That's where the Steam Controller has an obvious advantage. Since you can control your mouse with the right track pad, you can easily bypass launchers this way. With a standard controller, not so much. In fact, to bypass this, you have to get up, go to your computer, and then manually start the game with your mouse. So the answer obviously comes down to convenience.

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It seems like under the right conditions, the Steam Link is an amazing device. It certainly does what it advertises to do, and that's to stream your PC footage directly to your TV. It's a shame that the experience isn't hitch free, and does need a little toying around with to get it to run as intended.

Sure, there are other ways to get your PC on your big screen, such as running and HDMI cord from your computer to your TV, as long as your PC supports this, but for $50, this is a very elegant, and mess free solution. But this product is still for a very specific kind of gamer. If you've never considered about taking your PC games to the living room, and see no benefit from it, the Steam Link isn't and probably won't ever be on your radar. Likewise, with time, the Link will get better as it gets patched and updated.