To be honest, I tried Steam Remote Play on my phone over Wi-Fi about three years ago, and it was a stuttery mess. Since then, I've never thought about touching it again. My experience was so poor that I just thought it'd be better to leave it alone entirely and continue using Steam natively on my PC or gaming handheld.

Recently, between AV1 encoding support and the SteamOS 3.7+ network stack optimizations, Steam Remote Play has shed its casual-only reputation and is significantly more reliable. For 90% of users, the ease of integration in Steam is now paired with pro-tier performance, provided you stop treating your LAN like a generic Wi-Fi hotspot.

The encoding difference

Hardware has changed immensely in recent years

The biggest jump for Steam remote play in recent years hasn't actually come from faster internet, though this does help, but it actually comes from smarter math. The transition to AV1 encoding has fundamentally changed how much data we need to send across the land to get a perfect picture.

If you're running a modern rig such as an Nvidia RTX 50 or 40 series or an AMD RX 7000 or 8000 series, you have a dedicated piece of silicon cord and AV1 hardware encoder. Steam remote play now intelligently defaults to AV1 when both the host and client support it. AV1 is roughly 30% more efficient than H.264 encoding, meaning you can stream 4K at 120Hz at a bit rate of just 100Mbps. You still get a cleaner and sharper image than a 150 MB/s H.264 stream. This significantly changes the picture quality you're seeing. The beautiful preset on Steam now uses AV1's superior handling of gradients, which virtually eliminates the blocky artifacts you used to see in dark shadows or fog in games like Elden Ring or Cyberpunk 2077.

Of course, not everyone is on 2026-era hardware. If you're streaming to an older client device like a legacy Steam Link box and an older laptop or even a Raspberry Pi 4, AV1 might be too heavy for it to decode, leading to massive input lag. To fix this, you can go into advanced client settings and force HEVC, which is H.265. This is a Goldilocks codec for older hardware as it offers significantly better color depth and detail than the legacy AVC codec, but almost every piece of tech made after 2018 has a dedicated chip to decode it instantly. As a result, you get a great image quality that looks 4K adjacent without the 50ms processing penalty that would make your game feel like it's struggling and lagging significantly.

Steam Remote Play usually mirrors your physical monitor. If you have a 1080p monitor but want to stream 4K to your living room TV, then you might feel stuck. A little hack to fix this issue is using the Virtual Display Driver, which is a super popular community tool. You can set up a virtual 4K 120 screen that only exists when you start a remote play session. This allows your PC to render at the TV's native resolution without you needing to leave your physical monitor turned on at all.

But internet is always key

A wired connection takes you a long way

One of the biggest roadblocks when it comes to remote play is internet connection. You can have a 2.5Gbps internet plan, but if your PC and your TV are both on 5 GHz Wi-Fi, then you've already lost. Realistically, in order to utilize Steam Remote Play to its best potential you need to be on a wired first connection. A local gigabit Ethernet function has a ping of less than 1ms; even the best Wi-Fi 7 setups can fluctuate between 5 and 20ms. To realize the true potential, at least the host PC must be wired. If the host is wired, even a Wi-Fi 6e client can feel native. If both are wireless, you're really and truly fighting physics for the absolute best performance possible. Having both devices wired in is absolutely essential for the best possible performance you can get.

One of the most powerful features in Steam's arsenal is hidden deep in the advanced menus and, for Steam Deck OLED owners, a specific developer-level tweak is the final piece of the puzzle for a flawless Steam Remote Play stream.

Tucked away in the advanced client options, you'll find a toggle for low-latency networking. This essentially bypasses the standard Windows/Linux network buffers, pushing packets directly to the decoder as soon as they arrive. It shaves off those last few milliseconds of floaty input lag. If you're playing a precision platformer or rhythm game, this toggle is the difference between hitting a jump or falling into a pit.

If you've noticed a rhythmic hitch in your stream every few minutes on the Steam Deck OLED, you aren't imagining it. By default, the Wi-Fi chip periodically scans for better access points, causing a momentary spike in latency. To fix this, enable developer mode in the system settings. Then in the new developer tab at the bottom, find and disable Wi-Fi power management. This prevents the radio from sleeping or scanning during active data transfers, eliminating that 7-minute shutter cycle and providing a perfectly flat latency graph.

Steam Remote Play could make the Steam Machine obselete

If you already have the PC

In the future, Valve's newly released 2026 Steam Machine will be a living room PC and could eradicate the need for Steam Remote Play at all. However, this dedicated SteamOS hardware can use a proprietary direct link protocol to talk to a host PC over LAN, effectively making your beefy office rig the engine for your silent living room console if you'd like.

However, save yourself hundreds of dollars and use Steam Remote Play instead. While there are alternative options like sunshine, which is great if you want to spend four hours tweaking bit rates, being able to click play and have a 95% perfect experience, Steam Remote Play is the clear winner for me. Your LAN is a lot faster than you think. Your settings are probably just wrong. Tweak a few essential settings and Steam Remote Play will become your new best friend.