[0.16.51] High frequency flickering with Steam In-Home Streaming

[Elladan]

Most mainstream problem ever here! Not niche at all!

I like to use Steam In-Home Streaming with Factorio, since my desktop is much better able to keep FPS/UPS up with larger bases than my laptop. This seems to mostly work (it's stable, latency is good).

However, when Factorio is in full screen mode on the desktop host, it will randomly experience screen flicker, where the entire screen turns black and then returns one frame later. Sometimes this just happens occasionally, other times it's every other frame, leading to a very painful 30hz strobe.

I'm not sure if this is related to visual complexity on the screen or not. I don't experience this strobe effect with any other Steam game I've tried.

There is a workaround: if I start Factorio in windowed mode on the host, it does not flicker. However, it's somewhat irritating to fiddle with window sizes each time.

Both client and server are running Linux.

[edit: fixed name of Steam feature]

[Koub]

Hi,
Have you tried to disable Vsync ?

[steinio]

Steam Remote Play?
Need to google that - sounds interesting.

[Elladan]

Steam Remote Play?
Need to google that - sounds interesting.

I guess it's actually called "In-home streaming." I somehow got the name mixed up in my head!

[Elladan]

Hi,
Have you tried to disable Vsync ?

Thanks for the suggestion. I just tested with and without Vsync, and the black flicker seemed the same each way.

[thedarkbunny]

I've had similar issues with Steam before. Try the following:

On the host, go to Settings -> In-Home Streaming -> Advanced Host Options, and uncheck "Enable hardware encoding"

[Elladan]

I've had similar issues with Steam before. Try the following:

On the host, go to Settings -> In-Home Streaming -> Advanced Host Options, and uncheck "Enable hardware encoding"

Thanks for the suggestion! I had actually tried all the obvious combinations in that tab before, but I went ahead and tried them again.

Disable hardware encoding: does not stop the flicker (performance does get noticeably worse).
Disable NVFBC capture on NVidia CPU as well as disable hardware encoding: does not stop the flicker -- actually, flicker gets much worse.

From memory, I also tried disabling hardware decoding on the client, even though this is clearly a server side issue. I believe I also replicated this problem with the Android client once.