Valve and Nvidia have teamed up to improve the performance of Steam's in-home streaming feature by adding in support for hardware encoding on Nvidia GeForce graphics cards. This new feature works in a similar way to Nvidia's own ‘Game Stream' implementation for the Nvidia Shield handheld and tablet.
Valve's own Sam Lantinga gave a statement: “We've worked closely with Nvidia to support hardware encoding on GeForce graphics cards with our Steam in-home streaming technology, and the result is nothing short of amazing.”
In-home streaming will likely be a flagship feature of the upcoming Steam Machines, which were recently delayed until next year so that Valve can perfect its controller.
Streaming will come with support for resolutions up to 1080p at sixty frames per second. Those of you who have used Nvidia Shadow Play will know that GTX 600 and 700 series cards come with a dedicated hardware encoder on-board, which allows for streaming and recording with minimal lag- leaving the CPU available to be fully utilised while gaming.
At this moment in time, AMD has no such feature.
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KitGuru Says: This certainly puts Nvidia at an advantage when it comes to streaming games. How many of you guys use Steam's in-home streaming? It's been a while since I last tried it out myself.
Source: Nvidia