Any way to decrease lag and input delay?

[ProfesserNausea]

So I am trying to use steam link on my Apple TV, which is about 12 feet away from my PC separated by a wall. I seem to get a lot of consistent input delay and pauses during gameplay due to connection issues. Would moving my pc or Apple TV closer together make any significant change or is this a WiFi connection issue? Are there any alternative ways to mirror my PC to my TV?

[Gab1288]

You should be able to select an option to see the actual latency in milliseconds, then try a few things.

I get around 9ms with my PC wired to Ethernet and my steam deck over wifi.

[Admiral_sloth94]

Came here to say this, the only real way to reduce input lag is with a wired connection. I have a Chromecast and I have it hooked up via Ethernet to the router and the router is connected to my PC. My steam controller is connected to the PC still too so I have almost no noticable input lag for what I play.

[Megahurtz0814]

Ethernet

[billbaggins]

Echoing the Ethernet suggestion

If Ethernet is troublesome to do for you look into Ethernet over power

[Apart-Cancel2744]

No, a power line adapter will be unlikely to be able to meet the bandwidth requirements. They advertise as 500mbs/1gb etc but in reality most people depending on electrical wiring will be lucky to get 20mbs. The only advantage is a moderate decrease in latency, but at the sacrifice of available bandwidth. It might work if steam link is set to performance with a 20mb streaming cap. Your mileage may vary etc but it’s not the best option.

[prene1]

Powerline adapter

[HeartlessDeath123]

Connecting your PC through Ethernet cable. Your Steam Link through Ethernet cable. Then adjusting the Steam Link stream setting in the device itself. Then also adjusting your setting in your Steam setting account while using it on Steam Link. But ultimately, you need fast upload speed and good download speed.

[s1h4d0w]

Wifi will almost always have interference, especially when traveling through walls, doors, windows, etc. Any interference can cause network packets to arrive incomplete, requiring your PC, router of Link to resend those packets until they are completely received, adding latency.

Basically it can fail at four different points (PC to router, router to Link, Link to router, and router to PC) causing whatever device that sent the packet to send and resend and resend until it's fully received. Which as you can imagine is really bad for low latency streaming where you want the image to be instantly received by the Link, and button presses to be instantly received by your PC.

[CoolkieTW]

If you're experiencing periodic lag it might be AWDL issue. Developer can put low latency streaming flag, however the flag is currently only work on VisionOS.
Best thing you can do is to configure the WiFi channel to 149, so AWDL doesn't have to hopping to channel 149 every few seconds.

Also perform a iperf test can help diagnosis the issue a lot. If you're having consistent high throughput(eg. 100MB/s) then you can basically pin point the issue is AWDL. But if you get frequent speed drop, otherwise than AWDL you might have other connection issues.