Play Triple A Games on Your Raspberry Pi by Streaming with Parsec

One of the biggest fantasies for a lot of gamers is the dream of being able to play graphics-intensive triple A games without being tethered to a dedicated gaming rig. Portable gaming systems certainly have their place, and many of the best games ever made have been released on them, but they don’t replace the power of a real gaming computer (and the games that you can play on one).

Services like the (now defunct) OnLive cloud gaming platform have attempted to bridge this gap. OnLive (and similar services, like PlayStation Now), tried to bring high-end gaming to low-end devices by streaming video of the game. The game itself runs on a powerful computer, and the client device only needs to display the video and send control commands back to the computer running the game.

The potential is obvious: it means you could, theoretically, play a very intensive game on a device with practically no processing power. And, you could do it from anywhere. The reality for OnLive, however, was that network bandwidth and latency couldn’t provide a seamless experience for most people. But, improvements have been made over the years, and Parsec shows us how this may be feasible today.

In his nice tutorial video, James Stringer from Parsec demonstrates how to setup the Parsec service to use a Raspberry Pi 3 as the client. Because the Raspberry Pi is great at displaying HD video, gameplay is really smooth as long as the network is up to the task. You’ll need sufficient enough bandwidth, as well as a low latency for the game to feel really responsive.

The Parsec server, however, needs to be running on a Windows rig. That makes sense, considering Windows is the only OS that even gets all of the triple A games, but it’s something to consider. It’d be nice to see the server available for other operating systems in the future though. If you don’t have your own dedicated gaming rig, it’s possible to run Parsec on a cloud server and play your games from there. Again, the biggest factor for playability is going to the quality of your network connection, but it’s certainly worth giving Parsec a try!