- 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,
there it is, iOS,
and on Xbox?
Let's see just how many devices I can play my PC games on.
(electronic beeping)
(upbeat electronic music)
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, eight-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 hard-line 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 plumps 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 Games Store,
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 Games Store here.
"World of Goo."
We never even see an Epic Games Store splash screen
or anything like that.
Just your game launches and you're ready to rock,
Enough of 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 wanna 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 gonna 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.
Framerate let's you choose
whether you wanna it 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 ultrahigh bit rates,
which we've seen before.
50 megabit per second
is the limit of NVIDIA's NVENC encoder,
but this is the other one.
Ultrahigh frame rates.
So now we can go back into our streaming settings,
and we've got, ooh, 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.
They've been updating this
in the time that I've been working on this video.
And yesterday, this was capped at a 120 FPS.
Now, apparently, we can stream at 144.
I don't have a device
that actually has a 144 hertz display here at my house.
So we're gonna 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 wanna use all the time
if you're just into this for gaming.
But for games that have a pre-launched splash screen
like "Shadow 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.
And we can actually confirm this just by,
yup, there we go.
When we swipe in you can see, we're getting at around,
around a hundred 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 wanna use an on-screen game pad,
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 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 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.
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 yes, I want to exit to the main menu.
Yes, I would 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 "Valorant."
For that, I will need not the 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 a 102 rather than a 120 FPS.
But that's "Valorant" 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
were 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 gonna have to go on only one direction
and line up your shots like this
which obviously is pretty stupid,
and nobody wants to do that.
Obviously, if "Valorant" had game pad support,
that would be an option.
Either through the on-screen game pad
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
to power in to 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 typin', ladies and gentlemen.
Oh wow, that's something new.
(Linus chuckling)
Yeah, it 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.
Chopping takes forever.
I'm glad they re-balanced that.
Well, we'll load this up,
just in case another tomato order comes in.
Get some of those onions choppin'.
Get out of my way.
Oh, I'm not very good.
I mean, the gameplay experience actually very good.
I just did not do very well
'cause 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.
Yup.
Oh no.
No, no, no, no.
Man, this is hard by yourself.
At least on this one you don't have to do dishes.
Finally, I wanna try some good old fashioned
PC to PC streaming.
Both of them are connected to a wired network.
And I'm gonna go ahead and just launch Rainway for web.
This one's limited to 60 FPS, for now.
But our mouse support should actually be working.
So let's go ahead and fire up "CS:GO" 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 Twitch reaction competitive shooters,
it's not the greatest.
But in something like "Shadow of 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.
If I picked 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 Playstore is great, by meme guy.
"Worst useless application on Playstore.
"You need to have a PC to play PC games on Android?
"Excuse me, why 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 gonna show you guys
the pairing process for adding another device.
Let's go ahead and link our account.
Yes, I have installed Rainway on my PC.
We're gonna go ahead and click,
add a device, ba-dump.
Then all you gotta 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 suggest you going and watching that video now,
after this sponsored video.