What does the Steam Link performance graph look like on your ATV? If it's got periodic light blue spikes you may be running into the Apple network bug in https://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/7/3818543965116898492/

Originally posted by slouken:

What does the Steam Link performance graph look like on your ATV? If it's got periodic light blue spikes you may be running into the Apple network bug in https://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/7/3818543965116898492/

I'll take a screenshot to give you a better idea soon, as I can't remember what the blue line is doing exactly, but I remember the red line was showing some odd behaviour. Over a period of about 10-15s the red line would slowly crawl higher and higher whilst the blue lines stayed quite low, and as a result the latency would go from around 30ms to 40ms in this time. Then the line would have a steep cliff back down, and the latency would be 30ms again, before repeating the cycle and climbing again.

I think I've fixed the issue, tl;dr is setting the stream framerate to 59.75 instead of 60 eliminated the latency inconsistencies and flattens the lines in the graph. Having it set to 60 shows the behaviour I mentioned above (red line gradually increases, correlating to the latency going from 30ms to 40ms, followed by a steep cliff back down to 30ms, repeat).

Furthermore, I didn't see any noticeable change between software and hardware encoding prior to this change, but now I am getting less latency again by using hardware encoding (probably benefiting from my 30 series card). Here are my test results, all the while using 1080p@59.75, "beautiful" stream quality:

50mbps, software encoding: 22ms
75mbps, software encoding: 30ms
50mbps, hardware encoding: 20ms
75mbps, hardware encoding: 26ms

I might play around with it some more to get my 'ideal' picture quality, regarding resolution and bitrate etc., but at least I can now produce playable latency results! Hopefully this helps someone out there, not sure if it's an issue Slouken can address or if it's just a quirk of my particular setup.

Here is the graph demonstrating the red line climbing and dropping off etc.
https://imgur.com/a/PERsA5n

Interesting, it's supposed to automatically reduce the refresh rate slightly to avoid exactly this behavior. What does the line starting with "Desktop mode:" show in the streaming log?

Originally posted by slouken:

Interesting, it's supposed to automatically reduce the refresh rate slightly to avoid exactly this behavior. What does the line starting with "Desktop mode:" show in the streaming log?

I'm having trouble finding "desktop mode" in the streaming log (assuming I'm searching through the correct ones). If you can please let me know how to find them I'd be happy to share my findings :)

Can you quit Steam, move the Steam logs folder out of the way, start Steam, then connect, then disconnect, and post the contents of Steam logs/streaming_log.txt?

Hopefully this is what you're after https://pastebin.com/zuZRgDVq

Originally posted by burgeymeister:

Hopefully this is what you're after https://pastebin.com/zuZRgDVq

Yep, perfect. It looks like you've explicitly set the framerate to 60 FPS, is that right?

Originally posted by slouken:

Originally posted by burgeymeister:

Hopefully this is what you're after https://pastebin.com/zuZRgDVq

Yep, perfect. It looks like you've explicitly set the framerate to 60 FPS, is that right?

Yep, though come to think of it, I'm not sure if I ever set it to automatic? Obviously I've got it at 59.75, knowing what I know now, but maybe if I'd set it to auto from the start I wouldn't have had this issue?

Originally posted by burgeymeister:

Originally posted by slouken:

Yep, perfect. It looks like you've explicitly set the framerate to 60 FPS, is that right?

Yep, though come to think of it, I'm not sure if I ever set it to automatic? Obviously I've got it at 59.75, knowing what I know now, but maybe if I'd set it to auto from the start I wouldn't have had this issue?

Yep. :)