Play on the phone

Picture quality

Stream settings are in the app on the Settings tab, in the "Picture from the PC" block. Changes apply the next time you start playing.

The "Picture from the PC" block in the settings
1Sound from the PC on the phone
2Picture resolution
3Frames per second
4Bitrate: how much data goes over the network per second
5How visible the layout buttons are over the game

What to pick

Network	Resolution	Frames	Bitrate
Cable (USB tethering)	Native	60	30–50 Mbit/s
5 GHz Wi-Fi near the router	Native or 1080p	60	15–30 Mbit/s
2.4 GHz Wi-Fi or through a wall	720p	60	6–10 Mbit/s
A really bad network	480p	30	3–5 Mbit/s

"Native" means the same as the PC's monitor. A phone screen is small, so 1080p and 1440p look almost the same on it, and 1080p is much easier on the network.

You can't get more frames than the PC's monitor shows: with a 60 Hz monitor the server caps the stream at 60. 90 and 120 make sense with a 120 Hz or faster monitor. While you play, Rulik switches the phone's screen to its highest refresh rate so frames don't wait.

Over a cable, turn on USB tethering on the phone rather than using adb. Through adb frames arrive in bunches, through USB tethering they arrive evenly, with a 1–4 ms ping.

Latency

The total is the network delay (ping), compression on the graphics card (a few milliseconds) and decoding on the phone. If the ping is turned on in the settings, the corner shows how many milliseconds a frame took from arrival to the screen. All together it's usually 20–40 ms over 5 GHz Wi-Fi and less over a cable.

The same things help as with lag: 5 GHz, the PC wired to the router, battery saver off.

Blocks and freezes

Over Wi-Fi some packets always get lost. With an NVIDIA graphics card (or no graphics card) the picture doesn't freeze because of it: garbage flashes where the loss was for a split second and heals right away. With AMD and Intel the phone waits for the next whole frame, up to a second.

If many frames get lost over Wi-Fi for several seconds in a row, Rulik lowers the bitrate by itself and says so at the top of the screen. The bitrate in the settings stays the same: next time it starts from it.

2.4 GHz Wi-Fi is a poor fit for playing with the picture: it's crowded, and the latency jumps because of neighbouring networks and the microwave. If there's nothing else, use 720p and 5–8 Mbit/s, or better, connect the phone to 5 GHz or by cable.

Sound

The phone plays everything the PC plays: the game, music, notifications. The sound is uncompressed, about 1.5 Mbit/s. If you don't need it, turn off "Sound from the PC" to make the network lighter.

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