Originally posted by _I_:

also check the log file
\steam\logs\streaming_log.txt

it will show encode times
if its not able to use hardware encoding it will take more than a couple ms to encode each frame

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

The Azure VM isn’t going to have accelerated video encoding which is likely the issue.

Regardless, this seems like a very expensive way to accomplish remote play since you could pretty easily build a budget PC to host your remote play games for cheaper than you’ll end up paying for a capable Azure VM to stream a game for a decent amount of time.

Originally posted by Battlewagon:

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

The Azure VM isn’t going to have accelerated video encoding which is likely the issue.

Regardless, this seems like a very expensive way to accomplish remote play since you could pretty easily build a budget PC to host your remote play games for cheaper than you’ll end up paying for a capable Azure VM to stream a game for a decent amount of time.

I agree with you on the financial end...sort of. I already have an old laptop that I could use as a bare metal server.

Partly, this is an experiment, rather than a serious deployment, and partly it's that I would rather have a server in a datacenter than an old PC that could burn my house down while I'm out.

The main thing is I'm trying determine how to do this, regardless of whether I settle on it. Again, I'm tinkering. I'm also thinking of investigating whether it would work on AWS.

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

Originally posted by Battlewagon:

Another issue you might be encountering is that you don’t have sufficient firewall rules to allow the inbound ports needed to establish the session or the outbound rules for the udp ports that are needed for the audio/video stream.

Yes. This is maybe the main reason I started the thread. I'm not clear on which Network Security Groups (NSG's) I should have for running Steam. In Azure, for the uninitiated, these are de facto firewall rules. I left everything in default, but I'm not convinced this is correct. On the other hand, I haven't found any obvious errors related to the NSG's. If anyone knows if I need something specific, like a particular port open, this would be helpful. Again, I'm running with the defaults at the moment.

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

Originally posted by _I_:

also check the log file
\steam\logs\streaming_log.txt

it will show encode times
if its not able to use hardware encoding it will take more than a couple ms to encode each frame

It doesn’t need to be “hardware encoding” specifically; meaning encoding with hardware accelerated GPU encoding. But when that isn’t present it must use software encoding which requires the CPU to have support for accelerated encoding for the encoding type, which the vCPUs likely doesn’t have the required CPU features to support the encoding. I believe they do have some VE options which support directed IO with a MIG partitioned GPU which would support hardware accelerated GPU encoding, but again this doesn’t really make financial sense.