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So I bought a Shield TV Pro, I am looking for some recommendations for my PC.
I have been a AMD graphics person since ATI days. Currently I have a R9-380 in my PC.
With the Shield TV doing game streaming that relies on an NVidia graphics card I was wondering what you all may recommend.

Options are (don't bother linking prices back please, I am in Canada and our prices are out of line with US)

1. grab a valid card for the game streaming in the house - low end
2. 1050ti 4GB as a secondary card
3. spend the money and get a 1070 8GB.

The 1050ti I am looking at is the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4GB Gaming OC ~$250
The 1070 is ASUS Dual GeForce GTX 1070 8GB OC ~$599

My PC is normally a 1080 gaming station but the game streaming is going to a 4k display.

How much is the 1060 6 GB in Canada? It's about 50% faster than the 1050Ti, so you'll have to weigh your performance expectations (I have a Shield Tablet but have never streamed to it, so no experience on how much latency that incurs).

I'm going so say you should expect to stream 1080p to your TV. 4k performance on PCs right now is super high end stuff (1080, Pascal X), and even then, it's not perfect.

The stream quality is based on in-game resolution. For supported games, you can check the GeForce Experience app to see where it gets placed. Most likely it'll pick the native resolution of your primary monitor. So if your monitor is 1080p, I'd count on the stream being the same.

And yeah, the GTX 1060 6GB looks like the best current option for 1080p streaming.

The 1070 was about $40 up from the 1060 which is why it was chosen.

derFunkenstein wrote:

The stream quality is based on in-game resolution. For supported games, you can check the GeForce Experience app to see where it gets placed. Most likely it'll pick the native resolution of your primary monitor. So if your monitor is 1080p, I'd count on the stream being the same.

And yeah, the GTX 1060 6GB looks like the best current option for 1080p streaming.

According to the promo materials it will stream at 4k and not the 1080 of the monitor.

From what I can tell it upscales the image but the game is rendered at what is set in the game. My TV is only 1080p but if I set the in-game resolution to something lower (1280x720 for example) that's the image that gets streamed (and it's noticeably blockier like a real 720p game). That doesn't change the TV's resolution, though.

A 1070 that's only $50 more than a 1060 is a no-brainer, so it was a good choice.

Streaming adds perceptible and unavoidable lag; Even with hardware encode and hardware decode, it's adding around 40ms to your input lag with encode, transmit, receive, decode.

Fine for casual, slow games. Godawful for twitch FPS shooters. Also, fine details are lost in the compression, so ultra settings with extra crisp, high-res textures will lose a lot of their sharpness when compressed into a 64Mbit stream, even if you have the necessary bandwidth for that by using wired ethernet. 

A 1050Ti will give you 1080p medium settings and anything more than that is wasted on streaming, IMO. Buy something faster only if you intend to benefit from not streaming most of the time.

Agreed Chrispy_ I understand the concepts.
I've played MMOs back in the day on Wireless G. I know the impact of lag.

This is for in house only, no internet games. Fall Out 4 with new textures next week is one.

Streaming is going to hurt those crisp new textures and also demand a quite serious GPU by the sounds of it.

Just sayin' you might be better off playing with the original texture on your Shield TV.

In fairness, I dumped Geforce streaming for Valve's own game streaming since I couldn't tell the difference in lag/latency and Steam streaming is way more convenient (as well as multiplatform with no vendor lock-ins). Perhaps Nvidia have tightened things up again in the last 6 months or so. I'm not sure how that's technically possible given that encoding takes time even in hardware, but I expect their experts know a whole lot more about encoding/latency mojo than I do!

:)

Well glad I have not bought yet... I just found the bit that says GTX 1080 required for 4K streaming.

Only because lesser cards than a GTX 1080 will produce a slideshow at 4K.

You'll be fine upscaling from 1080p using a more affordable graphics card. The compression artefacts alone will make 4K kind of pointless; I stream at 2560x1440 at 48Mbit/s and it's still covered in compression artefacts, either using the Steam in-home streaming from my GTX 970, or using ReLive on my RX480.

Thanks all!
After the thinking about it I bought an EVGA 1050ti 4GB.
The performance is very good with my wireless AC network and I am getting about 50-120 frames/sec on the games I've played so far. The shield had an FPS meter up for a bit that vanished after about an hour.

There are no compression artifacts noted, there were some oddities with Origin and achievements, as the game registered the achievement to Origin it would flicker and I'd see part of my desktop for a second.

Other oddities, Shield requires the video card to be in use by a monitor so I had to relocate one of them to it. It does not even show the tab to turn on Game Stream, which was something they patched in to the dismay of many people out here on the interwebs...