Let Steam a latest update for users yesterday, which mainly involved minor bug fixes and and a very few new features, just one other than Steam’s Remote Play it’s kind of weird. Seen by PCWorld, Remote Play now supports up to 8K streaming – weird considering just that there are two state-of-the-art graphics cards that have the specs for handling such high resolution, and 8K TVs can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. this is far out of reach for the average consumer.
If you don’t know it Remote play, is one of the key features of Steam that allows users to play any game in their library on another device (iOS, Apple TV, Android phones, etc.) from Steam Link App as long as their PC is turned on. The quality of the stream is partly dependent on the hardware that is in your rig. So if you only have RTX 3060 or something similar to your PC and want to stream to your TV at 4K, that graphics card you can’t handle streaming at 4K unless you turn the graphic setting down in the game, which kind of overrides 4K streaming.
AMD’s Nvidia’s RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6900 XT are the only consumer cards on the market that can handle 8K streaming, and even those GPUs can’t reach most 60 frames per second of games with the high graphics setting. Mostly GPUs can’t even do 4K, at least not at 60 fps on ultra conditions.
According to the latest at Steam hardware inspection, only 0.30% of Nvidia GeForce owners own an RTX 3090, and none of the new AMD Radeon 6000-series GPUs even appearing on the survey. The latest AMD GPU with the largest number of users is the RX 5700 XT at 1.02%. Nearly 10% of users you still have a GTX 1060 graphics card.
There is also the issue of bandwidth and data consumption. Steam’s Remote Play works similar to cloud gaming, but instead of connecting to an Nvidia or Stadia server, you’re connecting to your own PC. That data is transferred over your home internet connection to your TV, phone, or whatever device you’re using to play your game, and the inputs do you on your device are transferred back to your PC. That’s alot of download and upload going.
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Games can stream in 4K up to 20GB per hour, according to Stadia. 8K streaming could double, up to 40GB per hour or 25 hours of games for an entire month, assumes no one else is using the same data pool. That is good news if you are an ISP with data caps, but bad news if you are someone who has to pay to exceed that data cap. You also need somewhere near a download speed of at least 75-100Mbps to handle that amount of data coming through the pipeline.
8K is going to be a de facto intention for consumers one day, but that day will not come soon, thanks to the cost and accessibility of 8K TV and graphics cards. It is simple too many barriers to entry right now.