As much as people like to joke about the PC master race, there is something intrinsically good about gaming on a PC. You tend to have better hardware for pushing out prettier pixels, a better input mechanism in the mouse or keyboard, and access to just about any kind of peripheral you want thanks to USB compatibility. But what if you want to play your PC games, but not on your PC itself?
Fortunately we don't live in the '90s any more, because getting your PC games on to other devices is much easier today than you might think. Here are our top ways to get your PC gaming fix on something other than your PC.
Dedicated streaming hardware
Although there are a number of streaming solutions for modern games, one of the best is in using dedicated hardware to do the job. Although it's a more expensive solution than some of the others, it tends to mean you get the best experience, because with dedicated hardware comes less of a reliance on encoding and less input lag.
One of the best options in this space is the Nvidia Shield. Although expensive at around $200 for even the base version – and you'll need an Nvidia GPU to take advantage of its best features – it can stream games in up to 4K straight to any display you hook it up to. It works flawlessly with Steam Big Picture mode and can even be hooked up to an Nvidia Shield tablet and controller for mobile gaming if you want.
If you want something a lot more affordable however, the Steam Link isn't a bad alternative. It can regularly be found discounted on Steam to just a few dollars and offers game streaming straight from your PC to an HDMI connected display. It's not perfect and does occasionally run into some stuttering problems, but for slower paced gaming away from your PC, it's hard to beat.
Steam stream to another device
If you don't like the idea of buying some specific hardware to stream your Steam games, you don't have to. If you already have a laptop or other Windows device lying around, you can stream your games straight to that. Steam has its own built in streaming service that only requires you sign in to two different machines at the same time.
Install Steam on your laptop or another device, sign in to both and make sure your main gaming PC is turned on. Then simply boot up your portable device, open Steam and any games installed on your PC will be available to play on the laptop instead. Just click the blue "Stream" button to get started.
Understand that like the dedicated streaming hardware, the quality and performance of your stream will very much depend on the power of not only your PC, but your network and the device you're streaming to.
Cloud saves
Streaming is rather reliant on local network connections and that's no good if you want to take your games with you on the road. If you have a sufficiently powerful device to play your games on, such as a gaming laptop, then cloud saves could be your best friend.
The best part of this is that you don't even need to do anything to take advantage. Both Steam and GoG Galaxy support cloud saves as a base feature, so simply playing those games on a different device will give you the option of using your existing cloud save.
This feature also comes in handy when you need to format a device, as you can simply pick back up where you left off by downloading the latest cloud save.
Conclusion
Those are just a few of the ways you can experience your full gaming library no matter where you are. Personally, we use a combination of all three, though we do tend to focus on slower-paced games and non-competitive titles when streaming.
What kind of streaming system do you guys use to play your games away from your PC?
