steam machine isnt a great pc to begin with
the link is limited to 1080p60

but the host is already doing all it can to play games at 60fps
adding encoding and sending it to the client on top of that may be a bit too much to ask

imho, treat the steam machine like another client, use it stream from a much more powerful gaming pc
it could be capable of 4k60 as a client, if the host can keep up

Originally posted by _I_:

steam machine isnt a great pc to begin with
the link is limited to 1080p60

but the host is already doing all it can to play games at 60fps
adding encoding and sending it to the client on top of that may be a bit too much to ask

imho, treat the steam machine like another client, use it stream from a much more powerful gaming pc
it could be capable of 4k60 as a client, if the host can keep up

yes i understand that, but that doesnt explain that without a game running the streaming experience from within the big picture mode is extremely bad, yet if you are able to have the patient to open a game then the experience is great as now its just exclusively running the game.

apologies i forgot to say big picture mode dashboard was the one that is really bad

if it does not have enough cpu/gpu left to do the compression and sending the video signal, it will look like crap and tank fps

or if could be something blocking communication directly between the link and box

check router settings, disable wifi isolation and any vpn

if you can, verify they both get a similar lan ip, 192.168.same.different
and use a pc to ping them

When you say "Big Picture Mode" do you mean the actual dedicated gaming mode (e.g. using Gamescope) or just Steam running in Big Picture mode on the desktop? They are *significantly* different in several ways. Though I actually stream from Machine semi-regularly to test stuff, and it works well for me.

HOWEVER, this sounds to me a lot like something that was just fixed in the beta builds of the Steam client (specific to Linux), where in certain situations it would calculate a truly abysmal target framerate for streaming; So if you're using the default client, I'd *highly* recommend you go to Settings -> System, and change to the Beta build of the client and try again.

If that doesn't fix it for you, then I'd love to get ahold of the streaming_log.txt from the Steam machine (you can find it in ~/.steam/steam/logs/streaming_log.txt on Linux).

i was able to find the solution. it was VRR being enabled on the steam machine (host) after disabling it it works perfectly

Oooh. Yes, that would definitely do it. Glad you found a fix!