Your gaming PC does not have to stay chained to a desk. Several methods put your library on the living room television, all of them free or nearly so, each with real trade-offs worth understanding before you commit an evening to setting one up.
HDMI cable: the boring option that wins on quality
Running a long HDMI cable from PC to TV is the lowest-latency, highest-quality method available, because nothing is being compressed, encoded, or sent over a network. What appears on the TV is exactly what the GPU rendered, with no added delay whatsoever.
The limitations are purely physical. Cable runs beyond about fifteen metres need active cables or an HDMI-over-Ethernet extender to maintain signal, and routing a cable across a living room is a decision with domestic consequences. But if your PC and TV are in the same room or adjacent ones, this method has no functional downside and costs the price of a cable.
One setting worth knowing: after connecting, set the TV as an extended display rather than a mirror, so the TV can run at its native resolution and refresh rate independently of your monitor. Mirroring forces both displays to a compromise mode and is behind most “why does it look worse on the TV” complaints.
Steam’s in-home streaming
Steam Remote Play streams your gameplay across your local network to another device running Steam — a laptop, a Steam Deck, a phone, or a TV device with the Steam Link app. Setup is genuinely trivial: both devices signed into the same account on the same network, then click Stream instead of Play.
Quality depends almost entirely on the network. Over Ethernet on both ends, it is close to indistinguishable from local play for the vast majority of games. Over Wi-Fi, the picture stays good but input latency rises enough that competitive shooters and rhythm games feel wrong, while slower-paced games remain perfectly enjoyable. The single biggest improvement available to Wi-Fi streamers is moving the receiving device to the 5GHz band and keeping it in line of sight of the router.
Remote Play Together: the underrated one
Worth separating from ordinary streaming because it solves a different problem entirely. Remote Play Together lets you stream a local multiplayer game to friends over the internet, with their controller input sent back to your machine — meaning only you need to own the game, and they can play couch co-op with you from another country.
For anyone building a games budget carefully, this is one of the highest-value features on the platform. A single copy of a local co-op game becomes a four-player online experience at no additional cost, and the local-only games in your library suddenly become social ones.
Other approaches worth knowing
GPU manufacturers have historically offered their own streaming solutions, and various open-source projects fill the same role with more configuration options for people who enjoy tinkering. These can offer higher bitrates or better codec support than Steam’s built-in option, at the cost of a genuinely more involved setup.
For most people, the honest recommendation is to try Steam’s built-in streaming first, since it is already installed and takes two minutes to test. Only if it falls short in a specific way is it worth investigating alternatives to fix that specific shortcoming.
Choosing based on what you actually play
The decision resolves cleanly by genre:
- Competitive shooters, fighting games, rhythm games: cable, or do not bother. Added latency is genuinely disqualifying in these genres.
- RPGs, strategy, adventure, story games: stream freely. These genres are entirely comfortable with the latency Wi-Fi streaming introduces.
- Local co-op with friends in the room: cable to the TV, controllers all round.
- Local co-op with friends elsewhere: Remote Play Together, which was built for exactly this.
Getting the picture right on a TV
Two settings dramatically improve the result and both live on the television rather than the PC. First, enable the TV’s Game Mode — this disables the image post-processing that adds substantial input lag, and its absence is the most common reason a cabled setup still feels sluggish. Second, check that the TV is not applying motion smoothing, which makes games look strange and adds further delay.
On the PC side, set the resolution to the TV’s native resolution rather than a lower one, and if your TV supports a higher refresh rate than 60Hz, confirm Windows is actually using it in display settings. A 120Hz television running at 60Hz because nobody changed the setting is extremely common.
Frequently asked questions
Will streaming work over the internet rather than my home network?
Steam supports it, and it works acceptably on a strong connection, but expect noticeably more latency and occasional quality drops compared to local streaming. It is best treated as a convenience for travel rather than a primary way to play.
Do I need a powerful device to receive the stream?
No — the receiving device only decodes video, which even modest hardware handles easily. The demanding work stays on your gaming PC. An old laptop or a cheap streaming stick is entirely sufficient as a receiver.
Can I use my PC and the TV at the same time?
With a cable in extended display mode, yes — the TV becomes a second screen you can move a game window to while continuing to use the monitor. With streaming, the game runs on the host PC, so the host is occupied.