Steam Deck Streaming PSA
Discussion
After trying to use Steam Link on my home network a few times I gave up, it was unreliable and laggy.
I recently stumbled across the Sunshine/Moonlight (no Boogie) method and took the time to set it up this morning. It was relatively straightforward, but it did take some time to get HDR sorted as BF6 was extremely oversaturated. I found that I needed to turn HDR off somewhere, I cant remember if it was Moonlight or on the Steam Deck.
Once properly set up, I had a few rounds of BF6 streaming from my PC to the steam Deck connected to the living room TV. I did not measure the latency but the game played very well. The visuals were good, given that it was streaming. I ran it at 1440p and 4k and was happy with both. It wont match the 4k 4090 experience of sitting in front of the PC monitor, that was never the aspiration of course.
My starting point was watching the below video. I hope someone will find this of use.
https://youtu.be/ZEZRWjtFTyQ?si=XQ4SVS-kdpnTdbky
I recently stumbled across the Sunshine/Moonlight (no Boogie) method and took the time to set it up this morning. It was relatively straightforward, but it did take some time to get HDR sorted as BF6 was extremely oversaturated. I found that I needed to turn HDR off somewhere, I cant remember if it was Moonlight or on the Steam Deck.
Once properly set up, I had a few rounds of BF6 streaming from my PC to the steam Deck connected to the living room TV. I did not measure the latency but the game played very well. The visuals were good, given that it was streaming. I ran it at 1440p and 4k and was happy with both. It wont match the 4k 4090 experience of sitting in front of the PC monitor, that was never the aspiration of course.
My starting point was watching the below video. I hope someone will find this of use.
https://youtu.be/ZEZRWjtFTyQ?si=XQ4SVS-kdpnTdbky
Been a while since I was into the guts of this, but Sunshine/Moonlight was an opensource derivative of Nvidia Gamestream while Steamlink worked differently, further downstream in the frame generation & not using the same hardware capture/acceleration so it suffers by comparison.
The Nvidia stuff is really performant, especially if tuned. Gamestream might have died but GeforceNow is the same stuff.
Haven't looked at the code recently to see if Sunshine/Moonlight is using the magic enabling parameters that Nvidia did to allow the full hardware acceleration; Gamestream could turn on features that in theory didn't exist on the consumer cards just the pro/datacentre ones. As could anyone else who knew the magic word and didn't care about the license.
Latency with the Nvidia based tech can be absolutely great in side by side tests, biggest issue I ever found with the streaming was some compression artifacts on some tricky items like dark blue text on a dark background.
The Nvidia stuff is really performant, especially if tuned. Gamestream might have died but GeforceNow is the same stuff.
Haven't looked at the code recently to see if Sunshine/Moonlight is using the magic enabling parameters that Nvidia did to allow the full hardware acceleration; Gamestream could turn on features that in theory didn't exist on the consumer cards just the pro/datacentre ones. As could anyone else who knew the magic word and didn't care about the license.
Latency with the Nvidia based tech can be absolutely great in side by side tests, biggest issue I ever found with the streaming was some compression artifacts on some tricky items like dark blue text on a dark background.
I used Steamlink for a long time (with Nvidia Shield) and was happy with it after some tweaking of codecs etc. - but once I started going to 1440p res I started to see a lot of lagginess. That prompted me to switch over to Moonlight with Sunshine server on the PC and works for the most part, absolutely fantastically.
The only real problems I see are because of a difference in aspect ratio between my PC desktop (32:9) and my telly (16:9). Occasionally there will be a game that ends up in extreme letterbox or pillbox. The vast majority work fine after a bit of playing around with 'fullscreen' modes though, the real problematic ones are the games from Xbox Gamepass which generally tend to insist on running on a native 5120x1440p screen (my Windows desktop) and then scaling within it. These typically end up at best in a square box on my telly or at worst with massive black bars top and bottom.
The only real problems I see are because of a difference in aspect ratio between my PC desktop (32:9) and my telly (16:9). Occasionally there will be a game that ends up in extreme letterbox or pillbox. The vast majority work fine after a bit of playing around with 'fullscreen' modes though, the real problematic ones are the games from Xbox Gamepass which generally tend to insist on running on a native 5120x1440p screen (my Windows desktop) and then scaling within it. These typically end up at best in a square box on my telly or at worst with massive black bars top and bottom.
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