can you use teamviewer to play games on a different computer?

[Deleted]

my laptop is old and doesn't run some games that well anymore. in addition, savegames usually aren't server side, so any progress on one device is often lost on the other.

then i started thinking about using remote desktop applications on my laptop to connect to my home PC, so I can play any game installed at home on my laptop.

do you think this will work?

[n0cturnal]

Last time i tried doing something silly as starting a game on a remote desktop I think either the screen just went black or it was at like 1FPS. This was maybe 5 years ago though.

What you are talking about is basically what Nvidia is trying to do with their Shield/Grid project. I don't think it is possible to setup as a normal user right now.

[Perryn]

Haven't tried teamviewer but a couple of years ago while I was working shift hours I used to use VNC to connect to my home computer and then tested starting wow on it just to see if it'd work, but it didn't, as the video routine vnc used wouldn't support this. It is possible that teamviewer might though, but otoh should be quicker to just try it than ask, anyway :P

[Deleted]

well, i've just tried it with WoW, and perhaps it was due to both being on the same network, but I had FPS issues, latency issues and graphics issues that were sufficient to make the game unplayable.

[Incognito Noctix]

Yeah, this is probably going to be a no go. I've tried it before with Teamviewer, and while I was able to start up WoW, I got around 2fps. I doubt that it's gotten loads better since then. There might be some VNC program that can do this, but it probably wont be accomplished with Teamviewer.

[Melancolie]

The amount of data that needs to be transferred to have a good amount of fps is immense.. Furthermore implementing technology to view the kind of graphics that we see in games is very very expensive, and outside the scope of 99% of all VPN/Remote Desktop applications - ESPECIALLY the free ones.

With these 2 hurdles in mind, it will be some time before it will be doable.

When expansion launched we were looking at 3 hours or more of queue, so i used a Wake-On-Lan app on my phone comibned with teamviewer to remote-boot my pc and start up wow a few hours before i went home from work - the app is strong enough for that, but playing a game? nope, not doable.

[vinzet]

Hello,
Yeah, TeamViewer isnt the best sulution for remote gaming. If im not entierly wrong, they send the data from your PC to their server and then back onto your laptop, thus causing the "lag".

But, Ive heard a few things about Splashtop, that skips the sending the data to their server and goes directly onto your device instead.
I havent had the time to test it out myself, but maybe you want to take a look at it ;p

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

I've pretty impressive performance over wifi using Splashtop. The frame rate was "playable" (I'd guess mid-20s, maybe 30 FPS at best) but input latency was around 300ms or so. It's hard to measure exactly but you could feel the delay between pressing a button and seeing the world change.

You wouldn't want to try and play a platformer like Mario or an FPS game but you could probably get by in something like casual LoL, Starcraft if you're just doing campaign, or world of warcraft if you're farming/dungeoning, maybe some need for speed style racing games could work too but I think that's pushing it. Things where being super accurate isn't important would probably be playable provided you had a pretty solid internet connection at both ends (say 5mb up/down). Most of the time those games don't have the hardware demands that would prevent you from running it on a fairly old computer. In those cases you'll probably find the better graphics just aren't worth the controls feeling much worse. Games just aren't fun if they aren't responsive.