PS5 streaming, how I went from OK to Flawless experience with Chiaki
TL;DR: Shared household, my room is far away from the house main router in the kitchen with no ability to run a wire there. I got myself a small travel router that I wired to my PS5 in my living space where I usually play. Then travel router connected to the main router via Wi-Fi hotspot. Went from 720p / 30k bitrate to 1080p / 95k + I still have internet access.
Steam Deck is a perfect handheld for 201x or earlier PC games, indies, emulation and many more. But I don’t enjoy modern AAA games on it due to how much I have to sacrifice in visual fidelity and still pushing the system to the limits with very little battery life. I felt in love with streaming from my PS5 using chiaki-ng, playing AAA games with great graphics and battery life up to 8 hours feels great. I had 720p / 30k bitrate settings and while it felt OK I was thinking if I could push more out of it.
I live in a shared household and the main router is in the kitchen. My living space is about 1 room / 2 walls from it so the signal has to travel that far away and back. Since it’s a shared house, investing in any kind of a mesh system wasn’t an option. The solution I came up with was to buy myself a personal mini travel router. There are a bunch of those on the market right now. I went with Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) as I wanted something a bit more powerful with the idea to set up a local private network within my house network so I no longer have my housemates devices popping up here and there. I think that something cheaper like TP-Link (AC750) would work too used just for streaming exclusively. Those devices let you connect to your main router wi-fi (along with many other modes) so you could still access the internet.
In my living space, I then wired my PS5 to the travel router and connected via Wi-Fi on my Steam Deck. This way, the signal has to travel within my room only (because Chiaki uses local network for streaming) and the quality improved significantly. I now use 1080p / 95k bitrate with no hiccups. The picture looks much better than 30k bitrate and as crisp as my TV. Your internet download / upload speed of devices connected to the travel router may take a hit (depending on the quality of the travel router) because you now added another layer of hardware. But you could always just use “Main Router Wi-Fi” for general use and switch to “Travel Router Wi-Fi / Travel Router LAN” when you want to stream. I’m OK with slight global network speed reduction so I don’t bother with switching.
Short ramble: for me, there’s no reason to buy PS5 Pro anymore at all. I enjoy streaming games on the couch much more than playing them on my TV and they look great. For example, I tried FF7 Rebirth on my TV and I cried inside of how blurry everything is. Playing on Deck everything looks so much nicer. And I played the original FF7 on my PSP via homebrew emulation when I was young. Playing the remake in the same handheld factor feels so nostalgic. I saw footage of how the game improved on PS5 Pro and it will definitely enhance the experience on 4K TV but I don’t think it will matter much with 1080p handheld streaming so the base PS5 is great value if you have one already.