My hopes are fading... Arcade is still unplayable for us after many months

[KoujiBEAR76]

Let me start by saying that I LOVE the idea of PLEX Arcade. When it first got released I did my best to help out with testing and on the forums because the potential this thing has is HUGE. I also know that Arcade seems to work well in some clients (from what I’ve read it works well on iOS devices and things like the Nvidia Shield. That’s great!) The problem is that there is only one combination of host + client that matters to me and to everyone in my household: PLEX Server/Arcade being hosted on a Windows based Server or PC with the client being a Windows PC with a Chromium-based browser.

My host:
CPU – Dual Xeon processors (24 cores, 48 total logical cores)
RAM – 128GB
GPU – GTX1080Ti
OS ---- Windows 10 Pro

Our Clients:
CPU – INTEL i7 7700K / i9 9900K
RAM – 32GB / 64GB
GPU – GTX1080Ti / RTX2080Ti / RTX3090
OS ---- Windows 10 Home/Pro

All of it connected and streaming through gigabit Ethernet. PLENTY of horsepower on both ends, and more than enough, in my mind, to stream some 8bit or 16bit games.

Unfortunately every single SNES, GBA, N64 and even some NES games we try to play will stutter, both the gameplay and audio making them unplayable. I haven’t tested every game, obviously, but I can pick a game at random (I have pretty much ALL of them in my library) and I guarantee there’s a 98% chance it will have issues.

The fact is that I was so disappointed by the continuation of these issues (not to mention the complaints from my other family members every few days) that I decided to basically put it all aside. I told everyone to just stop trying for a while, paid my Arcade subscription and just hoped that when I re-visited the service in the future it would just work and be as amazing as I’ve always hoped it could be.

As of today it’s still unusable. So, I want to know if anyone else is having these sort of issues, specifically with a Windows + Windows Host/Client configuration, and if anyone has been able to get it all working good. And I guess from the awesome developers I just want to know if I should continue to subscribe or if development has stopped at this point. Kinda feels like it has. Bummer.

[Capitaine-Iglo]

Same here, it stutters badly and it’s unplayable on Android TV (compression artifacts), it’s bad that for the last months Plex got everything right but failed horribly with Plex Arcade when it was a killer feature at launch.
It’s been months without updates so I wouldn’t be surprised if it is scraped by Plex Labs when there is plenty of room to improve it, make more systems available and why not even some PC game streaming.

Subscription cancelled until they come with huge improvement like access to managed users, stream stabillity (this might be Parsec side), more systems supported, included core selection when adding a system

There’s Retroarcher but it’s a real pain to setup and you have to do wizzard stuff to play game outside the home network.

[KoujiBEAR76]

Yeah, I just canceled my Arcade sub. Super sad about it too, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the forums and I’m reeeally hoping to re-sub in a year or two. Just the idea of being able to share a central emulation library with every computer in my home is so magical to me. I really hope they get the kinks out. For now I’m gonna look into RetroArcher (didn’t even know that existed, thank you!!) and I’m gonna see if I can get that working. Even if its a pain to set up or it needs a lot of tinkering it will be worth it if it works. We shall see.