I’ve recently tried Steam Link, AMD Link, Parsec and Rainway with my Android TV. It’s a Realme 1080p TV Stick with a S805X2 SOC, so nothing fancy. It is running Android TV 11.

I find that Steam Link works the best. It’s the only one with support for HEVC hardware decoding. The experience is very smooth with no frame drops. I left the bitrate uncapped, and it normally ran around 60mbps. I was really surprised since on my iPad Steam Link was the worst. The only problem with Steam Link is that I can’t get the controller to work with GamePass games.

AMD Link was okay. It doesn’t seem to have hardware decoding support on Android TV, so to achieve the best performance I’m using X265 at up to 10mbps. Using those settings the decoding latency is about 8ms which is not horrible, but not nearly as smooth as Steam Link.

Rainway works about the same as AMD Link. It has support for hardware decoding, but only for H264. It seems like the H264 decoder on my TV Stick is not nearly as good as the HEVC decoder, since to get smooth gameplay I had to limit the bitrate to 5mbps. With this bitrate cap, it is smoother than AMD Link, but the visual quality is way worst.

I’ve had no luck at all with Parsec. Nothing seems to work for me. The app is the same as the phone app. There’s no special TV app and It seems to require a mouse to use.

So far AMD Link is my favorite for GamePass games, and Steam Link for everything else.

Update: I managed to get the controller working on GamePass games with Steam Link using GlosC. Another nice thing with Steam Link is that it can power on your PC remotely if you have Wake on Lan set up.