# Steam link vs AMD link vs Nvidia



## jasper1605 (Oct 26, 2020)

Hello all,

Building a Zen 3 pc once it releases and I am stumped on what card to go with for my purposes. I want to be able to remote play my pc on my surface Pro 6 laptop but also in my home theater basement (I have an nvidia shield tv pro for the hardware on that end)  all games I have are on steam so my question is.....

Will steam link work with either brand card equally? (I've read amd may struggle with this)
Can AMD link work going from pc to laptop?
Will nvidia's service (blanking on the name right now) work for both of these applications of pc to laptop and pc to basement? 

This is of course assuming perfect network conditions. Thanks!


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## Mussels (Oct 26, 2020)

I think Nvidia works best in your situation, they have better encoding/decoding hardware and support your existing shield pro.


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## jasper1605 (Oct 26, 2020)

Thanks Mussels. I personally really want for AMD to be the right answer since it'll be ages until I can find a 3080 haha.  My highest priority would be the streaming to my laptop since my wife plays Sherlock games when I'm working the afternoon shift and the lappy doesn't have the specs needed for those anymore. I can easily hardwire hdmi from PC down to the basement to rule out use of the shield.  But sounds like Nvidia is just overall winner with any type of remote play?


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## kapone32 (Oct 26, 2020)

jasper1605 said:


> Thanks Mussels. I personally really want for AMD to be the right answer since it'll be ages until I can find a 3080 haha.  My highest priority would be the streaming to my laptop since my wife plays Sherlock games when I'm working the afternoon shift and the lappy doesn't have the specs needed for those anymore. I can easily hardwire hdmi from PC down to the basement to rule out use of the shield.  But sounds like Nvidia is just overall winner with any type of remote play?


All you have to do is install Steam on both machines and have them connected to the same user and network. If you have a Game installed on your PC but want to play it on your laptop you will have the choice to stream the Game. I can't speak to performance loss as I have 2 powerful GPUs and am on WIFI 6 so I don't really see a performance hit so I don't know what your performance would be like on a laptop.


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## Vya Domus (Oct 26, 2020)

Mussels said:


> I think Nvidia works best in your situation, they have better encoding/decoding hardware and support your existing shield pro.



I doubt it will matter that much.


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## newtekie1 (Oct 26, 2020)

jasper1605 said:


> Will steam link work with either brand card equally? (I've read amd may struggle with this)



I believe either brand will work equally.  AFAIK, Steam Link only had hardware decoding, not hardware encoding. So the hardware in the Surface Pro would be the determining factor, and I think the Surface only has Intel's iGPU.


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## jasper1605 (Oct 26, 2020)

newtekie1 said:


> I believe either brand will work equally.  AFAIK, Steam Link only had hardware decoding, not hardware encoding. So the hardware in the Surface Pro would be the determining factor, and I think the Surface only has Intel's iGPU.


Yeah it doesn't have anything other than the iGPU.  But now I'm even further confused, I thought after reading that steam link used the source PC for all the horsepower and the receiving screen's specs didn't matter to play the game?


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## newtekie1 (Oct 26, 2020)

jasper1605 said:


> Yeah it doesn't have anything other than the iGPU.  But now I'm even further confused, I thought after reading that steam link used the source PC for all the horsepower and the receiving screen's specs didn't matter to play the game?



The source PC encodes the video, the receiving PC still has to decode that video.  Encoding takes more horsepower, but decoding also takes some work.  

I have to correct myself, Steam Link does have hardware encoding that works with all 3 GPU brands.  There is an option that makes it work slightly better with nVidia though, but it doesn't make much of a difference from my experience.


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