Affordable Connectivity for Game Streaming

[twitchyzero]

So I'm trying to turn an old workstation into a streaming Limelight/Steam Machine. That's rendering games on my host gaming rig in the bedroom and have it streamed to the now HTPC in the living room

http://limelight-stream.com/
http://store.steampowered.com/streaming/

current setup:
Router: Asus AC56U 867+300Mbps
Host PC: N 5Ghz PCIe x1
Client PC: undecided

Hardwiring Host to router is out of the question. Hardwiring client to router is possible but I'd rather have a clean set up and may be moving in a few months so this is an absolute last resort.

So the client PC doesn't have USB 3 nor extra PCIe slots so adapters are out of the question.

Since space is small I'd rather not get powerline adapters. Router is 15ft away from client and 25ft away from host

I'm looking for cost effective ways to have this running smoothly. It'd be nice to take advantage of my router's AC.

This seems to fit the bill perfectly

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0090DX8O8/?tag=snbforums-20

Has anyone tried this? The reviews seem to include the pre-draft AC model and recent reviews seems kinda poor. I live in Canada so returning an amazon.com item is a hassle.

I live in an apt so I want to avoid the crowded 2.4Ghz band.

I'd also be interested to hear other options. Wifi bridge seems to be the best bang for buck option under $50

 

[System Error Message]

for streaming theres no need to worry about the networking gear. All you need is to have the GPU render and create the video encoded stream and use multicasting if your LAN isnt big. Multicasting allows streaming to many devices without having to collectively have the bandwidth for each machine but too many multicast packets can cause problems in a network.

You could have a GPU accelerated stream server that collects streams from multiple hosts and sends multicasts of the streams if it is only for LAN. You cannot send the raw frames from the GPU to another device because there just isnt enough bandwidth. Each raw pixel uses 24 bits of data so if you were trying to stream raw 1080P it would required a lot of bandwidth. The amount of bandwidth for say a 60fps game at 1080p would be 24x1080x1920x60 bits whereas even if you had only half the fps it will still be too much for a gigabit ethernet to handle. This is why GPUs have a lot of memory bandwidth.

Encoded 1080P streams uses 10-20Mb/s of network and with multicast it will only use that amount of bandwidth regardless of how many clients are watching. If you add even more quality to it instead of the web quality version it will still work in a 100Mb/s ethernet network.

If your PC doesnt have usb3 or PCIe for it you can bridge using a wifi AP connected to the ethernet port of your PC. The practical bandwidth of wifi will not saturate a gigabit link. If you lived in an apartment you might as well just wire everything. Ethernet has much lower latency than wifi. There are many cheap wifi APs in your budget range that would do the job you want assuming you only used them as wifi bridges.

 

[twitchyzero]

for streaming theres no need to worry about the networking gear. All you need is to have the GPU render and create the video encoded stream and use multicasting if your LAN isnt big. Multicasting allows streaming to many devices without having to collectively have the bandwidth for each machine but too many multicast packets can cause problems in a network.

You could have a GPU accelerated stream server that collects streams from multiple hosts and sends multicasts of the streams if it is only for LAN. You cannot send the raw frames from the GPU to another device because there just isnt enough bandwidth. Each raw pixel uses 24 bits of data so if you were trying to stream raw 1080P it would required a lot of bandwidth. The amount of bandwidth for say a 60fps game at 1080p would be 24x1080x1920x60 bits whereas even if you had only half the fps it will still be too much for a gigabit ethernet to handle. This is why GPUs have a lot of memory bandwidth.

Encoded 1080P streams uses 10-20Mb/s of network and with multicast it will only use that amount of bandwidth regardless of how many clients are watching. If you add even more quality to it instead of the web quality version it will still work in a 100Mb/s ethernet network.

If your PC doesnt have usb3 or PCIe for it you can bridge using a wifi AP connected to the ethernet port of your PC. The practical bandwidth of wifi will not saturate a gigabit link. If you lived in an apartment you might as well just wire everything. Ethernet has much lower latency than wifi. There are many cheap wifi APs in your budget range that would do the job you want assuming you only used them as wifi bridges.

I've had 15-20Mbps blu-ray rips they stream fine over 5ghz N 98% of the time. A quick search on google shows steam's bandwidth seem to vary by-game...I've seen 720/60p streams go for 20-30Mbps...I'm hoping to achieve 1080/30p. Any suggestions for wifi bridge or just go for the one linked in my original post?