Steam Remote Play feels laggy by default, but 3 hidden settings can fix it

Steam's Remote Play is one of its best features, and it's only been made more useful with the advent of gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck. You can play games with higher fidelity graphics and better performance and stream them over your home network to get a much better experience than these devices offer out of the box.

Despite that, there are some default settings that can actually hurt your streaming experience and make it anywhere from unpleasant to unbearable. If you've tried Steam Remote Play and didn't feel impressed by what it offers, check out these settings before dismissing it entirely.

Hardware decoding (and encoding)

Isn't it supposed to be a good thing?

Whenever you hear about a task being hardware-accelerated, that tends to be a good thing. Using your GPU for specific tasks can make them perform much better and run more smoothly, so it's not surprising that Steam would enable hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding by default on your devices.

The thing is, as far back as four years ago, people have been reporting issues with Steam Remote Play when using hardware decoding, causing stutters or flickers that can make the game unplayable. It may not be a problem on every device, but it's affected a lot of people, and some comments on this Reddit post were made earlier this year, reiterating that it's still an issue.

If you're still experiencing issues, it's also a good idea to check the hardware encoding option on the host machine (where the games are actually running). Try turning it off and you may end up with a better experience. You'll need to turn on the toggles for Enable Advanced Host/Client Options to see these settings, though.

Prioritize streaming traffic

Don't let other tasks get in the way

You probably have multiple devices using your network at any given time, and game streaming is something that requires fairly low latency and decently high quality to be usable. If your streaming traffic gets delayed because something else is using up your network, it's going to be noticeable because it's all happening in real-time.

In the Steam Remote Play settings, under the Advanced Host Options, you can enable an option called Prioritize network traffic, which allows your game streams to take precedence over whatever else is happening on your network. Though, if you're doing this, you may also want to check your router settings to prioritize traffic for those devices, too. Either way, this should give you a smoother experience overall with fewer latency spikes.

Adjust the bandwidth

Don't let it choose for you

Out of the box, Steam Remote Play will adjust its bandwidth limit automatically depending on your network, and in theory, this should work fine. That's the point of the automatic setting, after all. But if you find that image quality is too lacking and you have a good enough network setup, you can always try increasing the bandwidth limit to see if you can get higher quality without hurting the experience.

Along with that, you can also try to adjust the frame rate limit so you can get a smoother or more stable experience depending on your hardware.

Mac users should check something else, too

AirPlay gets in the way

On a final note, if you're streaming games to an Apple device, like a MacBook or Mac Mini, there's another setting you may want to check in Steam. It's called AWDL0, with the letters standing for Apple Wireless Direct Link. This is a feature on Apple devices that's used for AirPlay, Handoff, and continuity features, but what it means is that your Mac is going to be switching its wireless radios to AirPlay mode once every second. It's brief, but this switch causes massive latency spikes when streaming any content in real time, and it's extremely noticeable while gaming.

AWDL0 isn't a setting you'll find in Steam, or really any graphical interface on macOS, but you can disable it the terminal. The command for that is relatively simple:

sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

However, there's a good chance AWDL0 will turn itself back on after some time. There's a great guide for creating a script that will prevent this from happening while running a specific application here. That article is centered on cloud gaming with Boosteroid, but I've adapted the script to work with Steam, as you can see below:

Otherwise, all the steps on that original guide still apply, so I recommend checking it out for detailed guidance. Once you've created the application based on the script above, you'll just have to use it as your launcher for Steam, which will ensure AWDL0 stays down as long as Steam is running, and turn it back on when you're done.

Improve your game streaming experience

Steam Remote Play may be a great feature, but the tweaks above may be essential for you to be able to enjoy it to its fullest potential. And if you have a particularly great network, then you might want to consider checking out the new PyroWave codec. We recently tested it, and it levels up the quality significantly if you've got the bandwidth.