we recently tested some of the major game streaming platforms and so far they
all work a little bit differently some of them give you access to a library of
games that you're effectively subscribing to play while others let you
play your own games on their hardware
now rainway is sponsoring this video to show you their free platform which
simply streams your games from your pc
using it as a server that means that unlike other cloud gaming services it
actually works on ah there it is
iOS and on xbox
let's see just how many devices i can play my pc games on
let's start by taking a look at the gaming pc that we're going to be using
as our server we went out of our way to build something that's modern and
capable of triple a gaming but not totally over the top so we've got a
ryzen 7 3700x 8 core processor 16 gigs
of RAM and a GeForce rtx 2070 super
apart from those key specs the only other major consideration is your
network connection i would never recommend running your game streaming
server over wi-fi so a hardline Ethernet connection is
a strong plus and if you're planning to stream outside of your home over the
internet you'll obviously need an internet connection that has not only
strong upload speeds but also low latency so a fiber connection would be a
huge plus as well once you've got it installed one of the slickest things
about the rainway dashboard is that it just automatically grabs all of your
games and plonks them down into the games tab here so whether it's a game
that has its own little launcher like minecraft java edition or whether it's a
game that uses epic game store uh rockstar steam whatever it is it'll get
grabbed by rainway and if it doesn't show up go ahead and hit refresh and if
it still doesn't show up you can add it to steam as a non-steam game hit refresh
again and you should be good to go now let's launch something from epic game
store here world of goo we never even see an epic game store
splash screen or anything like that just your game launches and you're ready
to rock and after that though let's jump into what we came here for under the
settings menu everything is laid out pretty darn simply under hardware you're
basically just choosing whether you want to use software or hardware encoding if
you have a dedicated GPU with a hardware encoder i would strongly recommend that
you use that so we're going to use our rtx 2070 super under stream you
configure the parameters of your stream so quality is pretty much the bit rate
that you're streaming at and helpfully that's really nice they actually tell
you exactly what bit rate their fast balanced and beautiful settings
correspond to we're gonna go with beautiful frame rate lets you choose
whether you want to run at 30 or 60 FPS this allows you to choose between a
smoother gaming experience or less bandwidth if you're playing something
like a card game for example where the frame rate doesn't really matter and
then under stream scaling you can select a non-native resolution if you want to
save some bandwidth there i mean maybe you're streaming to an extremely small
screen where you don't actually need 1080p for example the rest of these you
pretty much won't need except for experiments this is one of the things
that really got me excited about rainway they allow you to enable ultra high
bitrates which we've seen before 50 megabit per second is the limit of
NVIDIA's n bank encoder but this is the other one
ultra high frame rates so now we can go
back into our stream settings and we've got what's this very pretty which is 25
megabit per second and extremely pretty which is 50 megabit per second and we
can actually set that's new uh they've been updating this
in the time that i've been working on this video and yesterday this was capped
at 120 FPS now apparently we can stream
at 144. i don't have a device that actually has a 144hz display here at my
house so we're going to settle for 120 but that's pretty cool without further
ado now let's give the people what they came to see
the ipad pro with an xbox controller
playing pc games why don't we kick it off with
shadow of the tomb raider you can see here that rainway works as a general
purpose desktop so as i drag my finger around the mouse cursor is actually
moving around on the monitor next to me it's not like that's something you'd
necessarily want to use all the time if you're just into this for gaming but for
games that have like a pre-launch splash screen like shot of the tomb raider it's
nice to be able to go in make whatever configuration changes you want and then
go ahead and launch just by tapping on it i would definitely recommend running
rainway with vsync on it does add a little bit of latency but let's face it
you're streaming over the network that is really smooth i can definitely see
we're not getting a consistent 120 frames per second here i guess that's
why it's an experimental feature but that is noticeably smoother than 60 FPS
we can actually confirm this just by yep there we go when we swipe in you can see
we're getting at around around 100 frames per second i mean that's why it's
an experimental feature you can also see all the other stuff in the overlay so if
you want to use an on-screen gamepad because you're using a phone or whatever the case may be then you can use that
and you can also decide to cut off part of the frame if you want like a more
immersive look to it personally i do not
prefer the immersive mode i'd rather just have it letterboxed and see exactly
as much of the content as intended but
that's uh that's up to you it's kind of incredible their dashboard
says we're getting anywhere from as little as four milliseconds to as much
as 13 milliseconds of network latency then you go and you look at it okay
let's just you know jump or do something the ipad pro compared to the monitor
here i would believe we're looking at one to
two frames of 120 FPS based on this difference like to the eye
one of them isn't noticeably ahead of the other another cool feature of the
overlay one that i'd actually like to see make its way to just the desktop
launcher is that when you're in it you can quit the game just by pressing one
button so many games you have to go through and do this whole dance
rigmarole of like yes i want to exit to the main menu yes i'd like to exit the
game even alt f4 doesn't work in some of them so it's really nice just to have a
one button i'm done now thank you you've got autosave why do i need to go through
all these menus now let's go ahead and fire up valorent
for that i will need uh not a controller i know it's been years now but i am
still so tickled that you can just plug a usb type c dongle into an ipad and
boom you got a mouse sort of we'll get to that in a moment
well there it is we got 102 rather than 120 FPS but that's
running on an ipad pro sort of
so apple still doesn't have the ability for apps to change from absolute input
mode to relative input mode which means that our mouse cursor just
moves around over top of the app and even if that weren't the case we would
only be able to turn until the mouse that we can't see we're
at the edge of the screen hopefully that will improve in the future but for now
you're just going to have to see you can see the clicks register you're just
going to have to go in only one direction and line up your shots like
this which obviously is um pretty pretty stupid and nobody wants to do that
obviously if valerian had gamepad support that would be an option either
through the on-screen gamepad or through attaching one but as you can see it
does not now let's try something new i'm pretty
sure that i'm gonna need power into my usb dongle in order to power both a
mouse and a keyboard but i think
i may be able to game on this thing oh
hey there we go we typing ladies and gentlemen
oh wow that's something new yeah looks like we're gonna have the
same issue on Android as we did on the ipad pro but the good news is that the
rainway team is actually working on this one and hopefully keyboard and mouse
capture on Android anyway should be a thing in the future
besides the controller experience on Android is fine just fine the chopping
takes forever i'm glad they rebalanced that
well we'll load this up just in case another tomato order comes in get some
of those onions chopping get out of my way
oh not very good i mean the gameplay
experience actually very good i just did not do very well because playing this
one just by yourself is not that easy if you're not that into a separate
bluetooth controller there are other options as well this is the razer kishi
and this is a perfect companion for something like this let's go ahead and pop this
off here just wedge that in there and we should be good to go yep oh no no no
no man this is hard by yourself
at least on this one you don't have to do dishes finally i want to try some
good old-fashioned pc to pc streaming both of them are connected to a wired
network and i'm going to go ahead and just launch rainway4web this one's limited to 60fps
for now but our mouse support should actually be
working so let's go ahead and fire up csgo again now the web app doesn't have
the experimental options yet but from my experience in terms of
inputs it was the most mature out of the bunch
this is a game where i'm definitely more sensitive to input lag than i am in
others and i think the guidance that has
been with us up until this time for streaming games
still remains when it comes to like twitch reaction competitive shooters
it's not the greatest but in something like shadow the tomb raider or world of
goo there was not a noticeable difference to
be clear though it's not like this isn't playable like if i pick this up so you
guys can see both screens they're very close it's amazing how far game
streaming has come this review on the play store is great
by meme guy worst useless application on play store you need to have a pc to play
pc games on Android excuse me while i play pc games on Android if i have to
own pc this app doesn't make any kind of sense no no no no it does make sense i'm
just going to show you guys the pairing process for adding another device let's
go ahead and link our account yes i've installed rainway on my pc we're going
to go ahead and click add a device
but ump then all you got to do is scan that qr
code and you are ready to go so why not
give it a shot they've got support for edge chrome safari or any chromium-based
browser on mobile they can do iOS ipad os Android phones and tablets and for
your tv they've got support for apple tv fire tv and Android tv they're gonna
have support for xbox soon as well for you living room gamers out there so all
that's left now then is to thank rainway for sponsoring this video checking out
what turned out to be a pretty cool app especially considering that it's 100
free download the dashboard today at rainway.com
if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out that recent video that i alluded to before having a look at some
of the other streaming services that are out there none of them are quite like
this one actually which is why hopefully they don't care that we
suggested going and watching that video now after this sponsored video