Moonlight recently went through a bit of a seachange when Nvidia announced that it would be discontinuing the server-side part of the moonlight solution, basically pulling the rug out from under them. In response, they made their own (Sunshine) which works on all platforms, not just nvidia, using the knowledge they’ve gained along the way. No longer beholden to the black box of nvidia devs yanking them around blindly. It is incredible.
Moonlight on a steam deck and Sunshine on a gaming pc works astoundingly well. I’ve been playing many games on Moonlight at Ultra settings, 720p60 (b/c why go higher). I could go down a list, but really there’s only ONE game you need to know I’ve been playing without any trouble:
Ghostrunner.
Ghostrunner is basically a sci-fi parkour game like Mirror’s Edge which much more twitch gameplay, more arcade-y/difficult. If I can play this game on Moonlight, any game okay with 720p60 can be played, truly.
I will go as far to say that if a game has cloud save, YOU SHOULD be playing the game on Moonlight while at home and then switching to locally on the steam deck while traveling/remote. I haven’t tried using Moonlight remotely and honestly I don’t care to. I’m extremely picky with input lag and the speed of light would prevent a sub-frame amount of input lag from being possible.
My network setup is CLOSE to ideal, however I’m using the steam deck wirelessly, which is the key ingredient to Moonlight being useful imo.
Gaming PC->switch->router = wired, Steam deck connected to router wirelessly on the 5GHz band, nothing fancy like the 6 people.
*Why not just use remote play?*
Remote play is fine, but it’s not fantastic. It has a few instability issues even on a network setup as streamlined as mine. If you want to check whether it would be worth it to play Witcher 3 at ultra 60fps or just keep playing it at 30fps medium/low on the deck, I’d encourage you to try it remote play and see if you care before setting up Moonlight. (Setting up moonlight isn’t that bad, but remote play is literally just one or two buttons). Also the big one is that Remote Play only works through steam so if you want to play a game on some other platform you have to add it to steam which is a bit of a pain.
tl;dr - Moonlight at home = every game you own at full settings, 4-6 hours battery life (unthrottled, could get much better I’m sure), sub-frame input lag, no HD space.
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I switched from Steam’s own solution to Moonlight cause, for some reason, Steam just wouldn’t pick up audio correctly in a couple of games. Couldn’t get that fixed so I tried sunshine+moonlight and it works wonders
Rather than downloading CP2077 on my Deck and emulating Zelda TOTK, I’m using Moonlight to stream them from my PC. I love that I can play them in handheld mode or even get a perfect 1080p docked to my TV with as good of a framerate as my desktop with 2060 Super and i5-9600K can do, even with RT on Psycho mode in CP2077 and still get even up to 4 hours of battery. For games that don’t require super low latency, this is the best way to play games on my Deck.
Moonlight is great. Steam remote play is literal unusable garbage and I don’t believe a single person who says it works well.
If you’re using Moonlight/Sunshine (or Gamestream), do yourself a favor and setup MoonDeck (and the Decky plugin) and make life just a little bit easier for your remote play sessions (especially toggling HDR off/on).
The crazy part is that streaming from your PC most of the time has lower input latency than playing on the Deck itself with a frame rate cap.
I’ve got Sunshine set up on my PC at home, and Moonlight on all the devices I use, including my work laptop and my phone. With 500Gbps internet, it seems to work really well, even when I’m not at home! I finally “get” cloud gaming, it’s a good time.
I have a dumb question… My computer runs a 4K 16:9 monitor. Do I need to change the resolution on WINDOWS at all on the host PC when I stream to the deck? Or do I just change in-game resolution to 16:10 (say 1920x1200)?
I agree it’s what I use most on the steamdeck
Guess I am lucky never had any issues with game streaming.
I’ve never gotten it to work properly. I always have to sit on my PC to troubleshoot which defeats the purpose.
If I only understood how to work it properly from two different network. I do believe I have went through every procedure with Tailscale as my local server to connect with SD. Even so it still does not work.
How does the resolution change/revert work - if there even is one? i.e. if I moonlight to deck at 720p will my PC go back to 1440p when I quit the game? Also can moonlight detect and change if I am docked/undock to a 4k TV for example?