I have recently updated the Roku stick in my theater room to an nVidia Shield console. The Roku worked flawlessly for what I asked of it, but the thought of having all the same functionality, plus google play store and nvidia link/steam-stream, sounded to good to pass up. Unfortunately, I have been having nothing but headaches with it.
For starters, I knew going in that steam stream over wifi would be less than ideal, but with AC wireless in the house, I figured it would at least be good enough to make for an enjoyable experience playing some games like cup-head on my projector. The problem is, the wifi card in the console appears to run at an appallingly throttled speed. Even running Plex on the device I am forced to set the stream speed to 10mpbs, which on a large projected image is a noticable drop in quality from native. I haven't been able to get the console to even read my 5ghz band, but I am going to keep playing around with it as I am sure I can manage troubleshooting that much on my own. So far though the 2.4 has full bars and doesnt show any signs of it being a signal strength issue. Despite this, the shield absolutely struggles to run movies on plex and failed entirely to even launch steam stream. When I attempt to run a game stream I get about as far as the studio emblem during the games launch sequence before i get an error that there was a connectivity issue. The device it is connecting to is connected cat cable direct to the router.
I have so far managed to get the streaming to work at least once when all other devices were either turned off or running on the 5ghz band in the house. That time I ran into an issue with my host device having its monitor turned off, and the stream not broadcasting any video. An easy enough fix, just go turn on the monitor of the host PC; only for me that would be my PLEX host (running a GTX1070) on a 4k 50" TV. Not exactly something I want to just have running all the time just in case I decide to throw on a game when I'm downstairs. I am trying to find the most elegant solution to this issue (having some hope I can resolve the connection speed issues by getting it to find the 5g band or running a cable through the rafters). The problem with the previously mentioned solution is that, in addition to the energy cost and the extra mileage I would put on the tv, Seam kicks the stream resolution down to 720p, which in turn changes my TV resolution from 4k to 720p, making the computer almost impossible to navigate as 1 single desktop icon takes up the entire screen. ( I use large font and icons already to make the system easier on the eyes when reading from the couch.)
My first though would be to buy a headless display emulator such as https://www.amazon.com/CompuLab-fit-Hea ... B00FLZXGJ6 but having never used one of these before, I am worried what to expect in terms of behavior and performance. The 1070 has just enough ponies under its hood to play the games I like at 4k with medium-high textures, I am worried that adding a display emulator would start to crush the GPU, since I would have to have the monitors in a mirror to ensure that even with the TV off all the stream windows are displaying on the primary image in the game stream. If I run extended (which I doubt would save me that much GPU overhead) I would have to switch which screen steam launches to ever time I decide to switch between gaming on the TV or gaming on the projector. I am also not 100% sure that will stop the stream from changing my resolution settings, in fact I am pretty sire it won't since my projector is a 1080p display and it has no reason to pick that low of a res unless it is doing it for bandwidth reasons.
Have any of you ever used a headless display emulator on a not headless box? what should I expect for performance degradation? Otherwise, if someone has a smarter solution to this I am all ears.
