Streaming game to laptop while gaming on other screen

Question

My laptop is very weak and I want to run a game on my gaming pc and stream it to my laptop. This can be made with steam remote play or just with parsec.

BUT

I want to play on the same pc at the same time. Running both games at once is no problem, but how can I stream one game to my laptop and control it with a controller while having focus on the other game and play with mouse and keyboard?

I tried to open one game at my second monitor and stream the second monitor via parsec to my laptop and control it via controller. That doesn't work because the game can't see the controller and also all the sounds are transmitted to the laptop.

trying the same but with steam remote play results in seeing the game, that is running on the foreground on my laptop.

I also tried to set up a VM and running steam there but I cant even start the game because VM ware doesn't support dx11. (Unreal engine says "dx11 feature level 10.0 is required to run the engine")

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How can I achieve this? I mean everything should be possible with a pc.

Answer 1

Some games natively support running multiple titles at the same time while mapping different controllers to each. How to do this varies from game to game.

A more general solution would be to use a virtual machine. Historically, VM GPUs have had poor API support, which is why you had difficulty with this option in VMWare. Recently, Microsoft's Hyper-V added support for GPU-PV, which uses the same driver as the host and thus offers a similar level of API support. When combined with Parsec, your VM can function as a practical remote gaming server.

I suggest using this project, which automates most of the work for you: https://github.com/jamesstringerparsec/Easy-GPU-PV

Answer 2

As you said, "everything should be possible with a pc", but that's not a 1:1 of "everything is currently implemented on a PC".

The heart of the issue is that steam Remote Play doesn't run as some background process on the PC, leaving other activity to do whatever. When you run a Remote Play all it does it stream your computer screen to the remote device, and then accept inputs back from the remote device.

As others have mentioned, Windows doesn't play particularly well with trying to have multiple windows in focus at once. Generally, you can only select one window, and that is the window that will receive inputs from your devices.

There are some subtle exceptions, like if you point to a different window and scroll your mouse wheel, it will pass that through to the window you are pointing at rather than the window in focus. However, the issue is that for Keyboard and Gamepad input there is no onscreen cursor that you can point wherever, there is only the typing caret in the focused window.

TL;DR: At present there isn't a clean implementation of how to play two games at once on a single PC

Answer 3

If you are physically in the same building with both PCs, plug your controller into the gaming server and stream with any other software, could even use Twitch. A bluetooth controller could in theory work 30ft away, same for 2.4Ghz controllers, USB is rated for 15ft.

Personally, I ran a 50ft HDMI cable between my gaming PC and a TV/monitor because it gave me far better quality than streaming it, but I was using Steam Remote Play to start the game and for the controller input.

If distance is an issue, you would likely need a 3rd device (raspberry pi?) to handle the controller with some sort of software to handle USB over IP.