Please avoid using this Steam feature at all costs

I’ve been a loyal acolyte of the House Gabe Newell Built since ye olden times of 2004. Or, in other words, I’ve loved Steam ever since Valve launched its digital PC gaming platform more than two decades ago. Over those years, I’ve been wowed by Steam Big Picture Mode and my beloved Steam Deck OLED. Yet recently, one key Steam feature has massively disappointed me. Doubly so in an era where cloud gaming got so good so fast that I genuinely regret buying my gaming laptop.

In short, Steam Streaming/Steam Remote Play sucks. Considering we’re talking about a company that is worth north of $10 billion, it’s a real shame that its device-to-device streaming method is so subpar. Though streaming Steam games between a high-powered desktop and a budget laptop isn’t completely without merit, Valve’s take on remote gaming currently leaves a lot to be desired.

My Steam streaming nightmare

Remote play, even with an RTX 5090 can be a pain

I have all the time for Nvidia GeForce Now (particularly its Ultimate tier), but I’ll get to that shortly. Over the last 12 months, I’ve enjoyed some truly terrific cloud-based gaming experiences. So, as someone who owns an RTX 5090-bolstered rig — a PC that costs more than my car — I was keen to give Steam streaming a fair shake of the stick. It turns out I might as well have beaten both my desktop and laptop with said fallen branch.

Steam Remote Play simply isn’t anywhere near the level it needs to be to appease hardcore PC players who might want to stream their favorite titles from their beefy desktops to an underpowered work laptop.

In my case, I’ve actually been using Valve’s remote play functionality to stream titles like Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem to one of the most powerful gaming laptops in the world — namely, the ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) RTX 5080 config. Why? Mainly because I couldn’t fix my laptop’s fan noise without resorting to using a noise-canceling headset.

With my high-end laptop constantly pummeling my eardrums for those times I just want to play Forza Horizon 5 while watching sports on my OLED TV, I thought Steam remote play would be the ideal solution, seeing as my mega rig sits right next to my television.

Sadly, Steam streaming is blighted by so many input lag and image quality issues that it’s almost impossible to recommend in its current state unless you have a bizarrely compelling reason why you can’t just play games on your main desktop natively.

Why doesn’t Steam streaming cut the mustard

Explaining why Valve’s remote play feels so unsatisfying

Playing the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 on my 50-series Zephyrus G14 laptop can crank out a near-deafening 55 dBA from the system’s fans. That’s akin to a 747 lifting off inside your ear canals. In my desperate desire to eliminate my excessive laptop fan noise, streaming games to the G14 via my 5090 rig seemed like a reasonable compromise.

Except it really wasn’t. Despite being lucky enough to own one of the most cutting-edge PCs in the world, no amount of hardware grunt can make up for the inherent shortcomings of Steam remote play.

Though my desktop handles all the heavy graphics and physics rendering, even on a 1GB fiber-optic connection, my sterling Wi-Fi doesn’t seem up to the task of delivering acceptable image quality.

With both my mid-tower rig and high-end laptop placed within 10ft of my router, streaming my favorite Steam games between these two systems never comes close to passing my obsessive eye test. Not only is input lag ghastly in pretty much all the titles I stream to my laptop, but the quality of the streaming image is nowhere near good enough. Heavy video compression produces a bunch of offensive artifacts that are impossible to ignore, even when playing at my laptop’s 2.8K native screen resolution, streamed from a 4K source.

I’d say HDR content is broken on Steam streaming… but SDR looks equally bad. Of the games I stream from my PC to my laptop, including Red Dead Redemption 2, Returnal, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, every one of these titles looks horribly oversaturated via Steam remote play, whether HDR is enabled or not.

Steam streaming vs. Nvidia GeForce Now

Team Green’s cloud service laps Valve’s remote play feature

If you’re looking for a far more effective method of playing demanding modern PC games on a mid-tier laptop, I can’t recommend Nvidia GeForce Now Ultimate highly enough. Thanks to advanced AI data centers, the $20 p/m Ultimate tier subscription gives you the power of an RTX 5080, allowing for 4K/120 FPS gameplay even in games that deploy incredible path tracing features.

With lower compression and a more stable bitrate compared to Steam remote play, Valve’s high-end cloud option feels vastly superior to both look at and interact with. Comparing a brief session of the graphically gorgeous, super-demanding Crimson Desert on Steam remote play vs. GeForce Now Ultimate is a night-and-day… one where the night brings vampires and the sunlit hours produce nothing but nonstop ice cream sundaes.

Using Valve’s remote play system to stream this medieval action-adventure from my PC to my laptop is a hideous experience; one marred by horribly oversaturated colors and glacial input lag. On GeForce Now Ultimate, though, those RTX 5080-bolstered servers create a snappy experience with minimal latency and generally strong image output (even if a little macro-blocking persists).

Steam remote play is seriously underwhelming

Though they obviously use competing technologies, when it comes to comparing two forms of non-native gameplay experiences, GeForce Now slaps seven shades of snot out of Steam streaming. Even on one of the best gaming PCs money can buy, using Valve’s remote play option to stream titles onto my laptop disappoints big time. If you want to enjoy high-end PC games on a middling laptop, you should definitely check out GeForce Now Ultimate. I love Valve, but Steam streaming is fiddly, fugly, and all-round subpar.

Operating System

Windows 11

CPU

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

GPU

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080

RAM

32 GB DDR5

Storage

2TB SSD

Display (Size, Resolution)

14-inchs, 2.8K

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) is a high-end Windows 11 gaming laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM. This 14-inch laptop has a 2.8K OLED screen with a max refresh rate of 120 Hz.