Enlarge / I wish I had more games installed for iPad-on-the-couch photo purposes, but I just don't keep that many games on my drive at once! (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Nvidia's GameStream had one job, the one in its name: stream games from the Nvidia graphics card inside your PC to the Nvidia Shield hooked up to your TV (or, back in the day, a Shield tablet ). It did this job fairly well, making setup simple and optimizing games with some custom stream-smoothing. Now Nvidia is removing GameStream from Shield devices —but an even better DIY game-streaming solution is already available. Let's take a look at it and talk to the developers about why and how they made it.

Nvidia's GameStream was a key part of the hardware company's pitch for its Shield products. (credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia is done with local streaming

Nvidia says a Shield update arriving this month will make it so "the GameStream feature will no longer be available in app." If you try to skip the Shield update, GameStream will still stop working at some point (and possibly be removed from the GeForce Experience app in Windows). In the meantime, trying to dodge that update means not using GeForce Now , one of Nvidia's recommended replacements, on your Shield and missing out on all the other update fixes and features that arrive with system updates.

If you're a Shield owner, like I am, this stinks. Shield devices have merits of their own , receiving the longest and most consistent stream of updates of any Android/Google TV device ever released. They're still perfectly functional as stream boxes (and even more appealing if Google lands an NFL package ). But a big benefit of having both a Shield and a GeForce graphics card will soon be shunted.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The video encoding hardware built into GeForce GPUs is getting a small boost, according to a quietly updated Nvidia support page (as spotted by Tom's Hardware ). Previously, the NVENC encoder built into GeForce GPUs could encode up to three video streams simultaneously. Now, most GPUs supported by Nvidia's current drivers can encode up to five streams of video simultaneously, unlocking capabilities that had always been present in the hardware but that were software-limited in consumer GPUs.

It's unclear exactly when Nvidia made this change, but archival snapshots on the Internet Wayback Machine show the old three-stream limit as recently as March 18, so you may need to install the most recent drivers to unlock the additional encoding capabilities. Your video quality settings may also limit the number of video streams you can encode simultaneously.

Most GeForce GPUs going back to the 2014-era Maxwell architecture now support the extra simultaneous streams, so you don't need a new or powerful video card to benefit from the change (though there are some models, particularly MX-series GPUs for budget laptops, that still don't have any video encoding capabilities, presumably because they're missing the hardware). Models as old as the GeForce 750 Ti are on the list, as are most GeForce 900, 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000-series cards. The kinds of video you can encode will still come down to what your GPU's hardware encoder actually supports; that Nvidia support document lists supported codecs, color depths, and other specs for each GPU.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia released a new driver update for its GeForce graphics cards that, among other things, introduced a new Video Super Resolution upscaling technology that could make low-resolution videos look better on high-resolution screens. But the driver (version 531.18) also apparently came with a bug that caused high CPU usage on some PCs after running and then closing a game.

Nvidia has released a driver hotfix (version 531.26) that acknowledges and should fix the issue, which was apparently being caused by an undisclosed bug in the "Nvidia Container," a process that exists mostly to contain other processes that come with Nvidia's drivers. It also fixes a "random bugcheck" issue that may affect some older laptops with GeForce 1000-series or MX250 and MX350 GPUs.

Not all PCs running the newer Nvidia drivers were being affected by the bug— some reporters observed the behavior on their systems, while others didn't . Even relatively low CPU usage in the 10 to 15 percent range can have a noticeable performance impact, taking CPU cycles from other tasks and preventing the CPU from going into an idle state. This generates more heat and uses more power and could also affect the battery life of laptops.

Enlarge / Nvidia says that an unnamed RTX 4000-series GPU can perform like an RTX 3070 while consuming power like an RTX 3050. (credit: Nvidia)

In addition to un-unlaunching the RTX 4070 Ti GPU for desktops at CES today, Nvidia announced a new range of RTX 4000-series laptop GPUs . Nvidia claims the new GPUs will provide big performance and power efficiency boosts, particularly for the lower-end GPUs that ship in the gaming laptops that most people buy.

The RTX 4000-series laptop GPUs use the same Ada Lovelace architecture as the desktop parts and will come with the same architectural benefits: DLSS 3 support, hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding, and a more efficient manufacturing process that Nvidia is leaning on to improve power efficiency. (Nvidia didn't specify in its presentation, but presumably it's the same customized 5nm TSMC process used for the desktop Lovelace cards).

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  Limited pricing and availability data for the mainstream RTX 4050, 4060, and 4070 GPUs. [credit: Nvidia ]

We don't have precise specs for any of the GPUs, and most of Nvidia's performance comparisons were pretty abstract. We know there will be 4050-, 4060-, 4070-, 4080-, and (for the first time in laptops) 4090-class GPUs. We also assume that manufacturers can set specific power targets for each GPU, providing better performance in designs that can handle it while tuning for power efficiency in thinner and lighter laptops. We know that each GPU will continue to use "ultra-low voltage" GDDR6 memory rather than GDDR6X, the same as the previous-generation RTX 3000-series laptop GPUs.

Enlarge / Nvidia's GTX 1060 is still one of the most-used GPUs on Steam, but its star continues to fade slowly. (credit: Mark Walton)

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 was exceptionally well-reviewed when it was released in 2016—offering performance a bit better than previous-generation flagships for a downright reasonable price of $250. PC gamers responded accordingly. Within a year of its release , the 1060 became the most-used GPU in Steam's Hardware and Software Survey, a position it occupied from June 2017 until October 2022.

The 1060 owes its longevity to a unique combination of factors—its original value, plus a years-long GPU shortage and inflated pricing for newer models like the RTX 3050 and 3060. But its long reign finally ended in November's data , where the midrange GeForce GTX 1650 finally unseated the 1060. (The same shortage and pricing issues that kept the 1060 on top for so long have also contributed to the 1650's continued availability and viability four years after its release.)

The nature of Steam's stat gathering makes its data inherently noisy; it can only capture data volunteered by users who happen to open and use Steam while the data is being collected. This makes it useful for identifying broad trends over time—CPU and GPU market share, the number of CPU cores in most systems, the rough adoption rate of new Windows versions —but not quite as good at measuring data points as specific as "which individual GPU is the most popular?" The GTX 1060 actually gained share in the Steam data for September and October, which strikes us as not particularly likely given the age of the 1060 and steadily improving availability and pricing for newer models.

Enlarge (credit: BTC Keychain )

Nvidia began releasing LHR (or “Lite Hash Rate”) graphics cards last year to slow down their cryptocurrency mining performance and make them less appealing to non-gamers. Late last week, crypto-mining platform NiceHash announced that it had finally found a way around those limitations and released an update for its QuickMiner software that promises full Ethereum mining performance on nearly all of the LHR-enabled GeForce RTX 3000-series GPUs.

Unlike past attempts to disable the LHR protections, NiceHash's workaround appears to be the real deal—Tom's Hardware was able to confirm the performance boosts using QuickMiner and a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

For now, NiceHash says that the LHR workaround will only work in Windows, with "no Linux support yet." The more flexible NiceHash Miner software doesn't include the workarounds yet, though it will soon. NiceHash also says that the software won't accelerate mining performance on newer GeForce cards that use version 3 of the LHR algorithm, a list that (for now) includes the RTX 3050 and the 12GB version of the RTX 3080 but which will presumably grow as Nvidia releases new GPUs and updated revisions for older GPUs.