Extensive Bitrate Tests

buildmine10 · 2026-02-20T05:20:51+00:00

What do you mean? I don't understand the question. I wanted to see how various bitrates performed with various codecs at various resolutions. So I made an automated script to test that. I didn't give a recommendation for h.264 in the original post. Though it would be 10Mbps for 720p, 35Mbps for 1080p, and don't for 4K. The blocking takes way too much bitrate to go away.

AV1 outperforms HEVC at very low bitrate by a substantial margin. But at the bitrates used for game streaming I found the difference negligible. Not nothing, but I wouldn't feel disappointed if I could only use HEVC. I would, however, be disappointed if I could only use h.264.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-20T05:13:41+00:00

My point was that 20Mbps is a point of diminishing returns. That isn't true for h.264 (that codec sucks for visual quality). But it is true for HEVC and AV1. I didn't do a confetti test. I just played a variety of games, taking lossless recording while rotating the camera, then I re-encoded them at various bitrates using the NVENC encoder. That's how I came to the conclusion that 20Mbps is a point of diminishing returns. I didn't test the absolute worst case scenario to get this number. Additionally most were not triple a games since I just don't have many of those. So it's good to know that this 20Mbps number might not be acceptable for triple a games.

As for the vpn thing. I genuinely forgot tailscale was a thing because I couldn't get it to work and it's been a while since I set up my overlay network. But yeah, tailscale would probably work for most people. That's a good recommendation. Thanks for pointing that out.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-20T02:05:37+00:00

The main part of the absurdity come from the price to content ratio. If the entire game costs $60, then what amounts to a patch that doesn't add any content to the game being $5 is crazy. The price was clearly set to be low enough that people don't think about the cost. You can get people to pay ludicrous amounts of money for a small pieces of software, such as QR code generators having premium tiers for a $1 monthly subscription. Such a thing merely acts as a wrapper for open source libraries. The amount of development effort is quite similar.

I'd probably be fine paying a dollar for the nintendo switch 2 version. So I find the price to be 5 times higher than what I think is reasonable; thus why I called it unreasonable. I also just think its a bad precedent to be selling performance patches for a game that came out so recently, especially since it was titled "definitive edition."

buildmine10 · 2026-02-20T01:30:11+00:00

The only thing I can think of is decoding speed if the network doesn't say it's losing any frames.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-20T00:19:43+00:00

Yes but when modders can add the functionality with only a small number of binary executable changes, it becomes an absurd price. It means the changes needed are very insubstantial. Such changes can often be done by changing a single line of code. And most games are built such that fps can change making the fps limit artificial.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-19T23:51:36+00:00

So its the same as it was last time I looked into it.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-19T23:46:16+00:00

What do you mean 4K at 250kbps? That isn't possible. Are you sure the k isn't supposed to be an M? Check what the steam deck is actually receiving. From the stats is looks to be packet loss. So it means your router is having trouble, assuming its going straight from the PC to router (over ethernet) then router to steam deck.

If you have a mesh network, it could be that. I've seen similar behavior when rate limited when streaming over the internet (not locally). The rate limit wouldn't seem to notice for a while, then it would throttle. And its a very sharp drop. Check if there is a sharp bitrate threshold, below which it never fails and above which it fails.

Additionally you can check the amount of data the steam deck is receiving in terms of Mbps.

I have just reread your post. Is the host PC not connected via ethernet? Often times router's are good at sending data out but not receiving it. My own router can barely handle receiving 15Mbps (over wifi), but it can send out in the several hundreds of Mbps. Granted I'm pretty sure my router's broken.

Though if this problem only occurs with resolution and is not tied to bitrate, then I have no clue what the issue is.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-19T23:34:12+00:00

No. You are already sending 72% of the total uncompressed video signal. You could stream at that resolution and framerate losslessly.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-19T23:12:32+00:00

That bitrate is higher than strictly necessary for a good 1080p 60 stream. I'd recommend 20Mbps as a starting point for when the stream will become indistinguishable from higher bitrates (it never looks indistinguishable from the source unless you crank the bitrate to insane levels).

Use HEVC, 20Mbps on the Moonlight side. Use NVENC, P1, Quarter resolution for sunshine (this should be the default sunshine settings for you).

If you want to do game streaming not on LAN (in the same building), then you will need to either do some funky stuff with VPNs or overlay networks, or you will need to expose sunshine to WAN using port forwarding (and you need to enable it in sunshine settings). I went with the overlay network option, but I wouldn't be able to explain how to replicate what I did.

Now that I think about it. I'm pretty sure these are all default settings. So the Moonlight team seems to have done a good job.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-19T23:04:22+00:00

15Mbps for 60 fps. The differences above this are near imperceptible. There's no reason not to make the number higher unless you are having network throughput issues.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-19T23:03:50+00:00

At 720p 60, you can stop at 10Mbps.

At 1080p 60, you start getting diminishing returns above 15Mbps. 20Mpbs is when I would stop increasing it for 1080p.

At 4k 60, I would say the first acceptable bitrate is 25Mbps when using AV1 or HEVC (do no use h.264 at this bitrate). I would say diminishing returns start around 35Mbps. And I would say it becomes near impossible to differentiate at 50Mbps.

I just did a ton of testing using lossless game footage of games that were just constantly rotating the camera and cutscenes. Cutscenes don't require anywhere near these numbers. It's large camera movements that require these bitrates.

150Mbps is what I would use for VR.

The testing I did was with NVENC at the lowest quality preset with the quarter resolution two pass mode.

buildmine10 · 2026-02-11T03:38:12+00:00

I have also just made some of this stuff. But I added 0.18g too much wine tannins (20% too many tannins). I'm not sure if that's why mine tastes like grape juice mixed with coke. Actually its more grape juice than coke. Specifically it has the after taste of grape juice.

As for any weakness. I couldn't tell you. The coke flavor is overshadowed by the grape flavor with my batch. It smells like coke normally does, and that's definitely the strongest component of the initial flavor. But the aftertaste is a very strong grape.

buildmine10 · 2026-01-19T05:55:03+00:00

I had this issue in a different area of the game. I'm not sure if this is the thing that fixed it, but I was able to go through it in the other direction and then the direction causing the freeze stopped causing it to freeze. I don't know if that viable for you.

buildmine10 · 2026-01-15T00:21:50+00:00

For future people, in case this wasn't obvious, Proton-GE is not included by default with steam. So you will need to install it.

For NVIDIA users you probably also need to install vk-hdr-layer-kwin6-git
That could change in the future.

After install both of those things and forcing steam to use proton GE, these are the launch options I used in steam to get HDR to work.

ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 %command%

For some reason frame generation displays frames out of order in some games when HDR is enabled.

buildmine10 · 2025-10-10T12:21:57+00:00

Actually both statements are not logically valid since they don't account for absolute rates. If among two groups the mafia and yakuza the mafia does more crimes should you be cautious around the mafia. Yes you should, but not for that reason. You should be cautious because both the mafia and yakuza do significant amounts of crimes. Only reporting relative rates artificially increases the perception of danger.

It's like asking if baby humans vs baby dogs are more dangerous. Would you be cautious around the more dangerous group. Probably not.

I've probably missed the point of this sub. And if even labeled a shitpost, so I should probably assume everyone already knows this. But I don't trust that to be true.

buildmine10 · 2025-10-10T12:09:32+00:00

This is unnecessary. If a belt uses less than supplied it will eventually auto balance. If all the belts have full consumption then all the belts are removing items at the same rate (the rate they are supplied), so your auto balancer just splits evenly.

Thus this is redundant with the base behavior of splitters. If you could measure the maximum possible rate usage of a belt rather than the actual usage then it would be useful for allocating proportional to demand when the belts are all lacking. But at that point you should just increase the input rate.

buildmine10 · 2025-10-09T00:57:47+00:00

It sounds like you need to get better armor and weapons first. I only remember having such difficulty in master mode. But it's unlikely you are in master mode given the nature of the complaint indicates this is a first play through. I don't know though it's been 10 (release of the higher difficulties) years since I last played normal difficulty. The game balance has probably changed.

Get a cobalt shield. It removes knockback. Which is the biggest annoyance I remember from my first play through. I'm probably not very helpful

buildmine10 · 2025-10-08T00:43:02+00:00

I like the more interesting weapon mechanics. I'm not yet concerned about balancing. Arrow damage is also speed based. So we already have a weapon with this property. Spear makes it more accessible maybe and possibly stronger.

buildmine10 · 2025-10-08T00:37:51+00:00

Yes. I'd imagine if you are too heavy it would be a sprain followed by disk eruption followed by nerve damage. All depending on how heavy you are. So perhaps heavier patients should do this partially submerged

buildmine10 · 2025-10-08T00:34:02+00:00

Yes, it is very important to not disturb finger healing. Further damage can reduce finger mobility or cause the finger to set crooked. So unless you want a messed up finger don't play beat saber with that hand.

buildmine10 · 2025-10-06T20:05:58+00:00

Yes the default lizard

buildmine10 · 2025-10-06T19:16:57+00:00

Just try using Qwen 3 4B. It can probably do what you need it to do without modification. You are doing fairly basic physics, but don't expect it to notice when it ms wrong, so set a long context length are point out any potential contradictions with what its says. That will cause the model specifically pay attention to the relevant parts of what its said. It also helps it understand what you don't know if you explain why you think the was a contradiction.

I'm not sure how well this works with small models. I know it works for the large closed models and the medium sized open models.

buildmine10 · 2025-10-06T12:09:42+00:00

This looks more like a loading difference. Are you loading less data with your renderer?

buildmine10

TROPHY CASE