That’s an extra expense you probably don’t need, since its non-gaming capabilities are covered by smart TVs, Chromecast, Roku, and console apps. Second, the SHIELD is full set-top box hardware with some pretty powerful guts of its own, and it has a high price tag of $200 to go with it. (Not to be confused with NVIDIA GeForce NOW, which streams games from remote server farms instead of your own computer.) The SHIELD is a fine piece of hardware and easily the best Android TV gadget on the market, but it’s in a close second place to the Steam Link for local game streaming for a variety of reasons.įirst, its dependence on an NVIDIA-branded graphics card in your streaming PC limits the potential userbase-both Steam and Steam Streaming are platform and hardware agnostic. The biggest competition for the Steam Link is NVIDIA’s SHIELD set-top box with its included GameStream service.
That means games that aren’t on the Steam store, like offerings from Blizzard, Activision, and EA, can still be streamed. Initial issues with game compatibility and latency have been ironed out (for the most part), including support for non-Steam games or titles with annoying custom launchers. It makes liberal use of Steam’s Big Picture Mode, an alternate user interface made for large screens and controllers instead of monitors and mice. The Steam Link is several years old at this point, and it’s been gently improved along the way.
The result is an itty-bitty box that sits in your entertainment center and makes a gateway to all the games in your Steam library. At the same time it uses controller inputs from your living room and routes the commands back to your PC, allowing you to control the game without needing to connect to the computer directly. The gadget connects to Steam via local network, either over high-speed Wi-Fi or gigabit Ethernet, grabbing the audio and video from your PC games and sticking them on your TV via HDMI. The tiny circuit board in the Steam Link does just a couple of things, relying almost entirely on the software on your gaming PC to do the heavy lifting.
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