We’re on track to reach 1.0 later this year, ushering in the brand new Rainway. Until then though, we are more than happy to share our continued improvements to the underlying Rainway technology.

0.5.0 features some incredible changes so let’s dive right in.

Stability and Speed.

Some fantastic milestones have been reached for us internally in the mission to optimize and improve the performance of our graphics pipeline. We often claim that we have the fastest game streaming technology there is, and we’re happy to say as of today, we are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest.

Our refined pipeline is capable of processing full HD streams in the blink of an eye, sometimes going as low as two milliseconds. Because of this ludicrous new speed, we’ve reduced the amount of overhead incurred, while streaming, down to nothing on select hardware.

1080P @ 60 FPS in < 4 MS

Our mission is never done, however, and you can bet we will continue iterating on our technology until the only barrier is the speed of light itself.

Better Secondary Encoder Support

Some games can be very unoptimized and resource heavy, leaving very little room for Rainway to operate smoothly and negatively affecting your experience. So we didn’t just focus on improving the speed of single card systems, no, we wanted to go even further by introducing some of our new optimizations to the way we handle multi GPU systems.

Systems that have an iGPU with Quick Sync enabled or a secondary discrete graphics card can now run Rainway entirely on that secondary device and at times, even have faster performance than the primary GPU of the system.

An iGPU from 2013 encoding faster than an RX 480

Our new zero-copy transfer engine removes the previous overhead present on secondary encoders as well, making it a solid choice for mid-range PC’s.

Lightweight Software Encoding

We understand not all systems may have a GPU with hardware acceleration available or you may have a Ryzen CPU and want to utilize its many cores for the bulk of your processing. You’ll be happy to know we’re introducing our new and improved software-based encoding, allowing you to play your favorite indie games, anywhere, on a budget.

Better Scaling

One of the unique features of Rainway is our ability to scale your stream to any arbitrary resolution without changing the desktop resolution. In previous versions, this feature could reduce the required bandwidth but would slightly increase the latency.

Now, not only is bandwidth reduced but the overall processing time decreases making your stream faster while retaining high-quality visuals.

Is That A… Mouse?

For a long time Rainway could not render the remote mouse cursor, and yes, we know what you’re thinking, “how hard could it be?” Very. With this change and our native keyboard support in Chrome, you should be able to have an immersive desktop experience.

Other Changes

Fixed a long-standing bug that would internally redirect NVIDIA users to the unstable generic encoder.

Fixed a memory leak that would increase latency by a few frames every 30 minutes.

Fixed an issue where the stream would hitch/crawl during intensive loading cycles of games.

Added a new diagnostic server-side overlay.

Added a new diagnostic mode.

Fixed a bug with Steam shortcuts.

Added support for various new game launchers.

Fixed UPlay games not loading properly.

Fixed Blizzard games not correctly starting up.

Fixed an issue on AMD/Nvidia cards that would cause the stream to freeze or go black when a game went fullscreen.

Fixed an issue that would crash Rainway when a game changed the color format of the display.

In Closing

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading through our latest changes and that this new update resolves any issue you might be having. If you ever need support, you can join our Discord here.

Until next time!