I’ve recently been trying to put together a remote gaming setup, and while I got it to work with Windows 10, the hardware H.264 encoding was a little flakey – it would drop out all the time at higher resolutions, and only one user could be logged in at the same time. So I started looking at Windows Server 2016.

One interesting obstacle is that the latest Nvidia drivers (49x+) don’t work on Windows 2016 server. But I randomly tried the latest 3xx series drivers which support the GeForce GTX 10xx cards I use, and those worked. Eventually after a lot of bisecting updates, I found that the very latest series of drivers before 49x+ – the 47x series “gaming ready” does in fact work. The studio driver of the exact same version, unfortunately, refuses to install.

The experience so far is pretty good, and I haven’t noticed any hardware encoding dropouts. There is an easy ways to tell when hardware encoding drops out: The image quality will improve dramatically (Nvidia hardware encoding is is a bit blocky under a gaming workload), but the frame rate will tank because all of the CPU gets eaten by Windows’ built in H.264 encoding.

Overall, this works much better with Windows Server 2016 than it did with Windows 10, but the process to get it set up is the same.

There is one major limitation to this – RDP only supports absolute rather than relative mouse movements, which means it is an unsuitable solution for some types of games, such FPS. So it’d be really handy to get this working with Steam streaming. Unfortunately, for Steam streaming to work from an RDP server, the session has to be promoted to a console session. Here is a handy script to turn your RDP session into a console session:

for /f "tokens=3" %%a in ('c:\windows\system32\qwinsta my_username ^| findstr /v "ID"') do tscon %%a /password:my_password /dest:console

Replace my_username and my_password with your Windows username and password. So start Steam and run a batch file with the above as administrator. This will take your current session and move it to the console. RDP session will be closed on you, and once that happens, you will be able to stream from that Steam session via Steam streaming.