11
votes
State of the art in local game streaming
I’m wondering what software I should use to stream games from my desktop to my laptop. I’ve migrated from mostly using my desktop to mostly using my laptop in the last year. But my desktop has a substantially better GPU and I would love a convenient solution for streaming both Minecraft and Steam games to my Macbook. I’m personally not a fan of Steam’s client on MacOS as it is severely buggy for me. So any alternatives would be nice. I’d probably be happy with a low latency low compression full screen desktop mirroring app. But anything more targeted at games could be nice.
Edit: I'm using the free version of Parsec and it seems pretty good.
Sunshine (server) + moonlight (client). They use the nvidia game stream protocol, which they’ve since sunset. But regardless, it’s still the best game streaming experience. The UI for both are a tad rough on the edges, as you’d expect from OSS , but it still works well.
It’s much much much better than Steam’s streaming app, as a point of reference.
Mostly agree. Moonlight appears in a lot of places (app stores), so it's worth trying first. Steam can sometimes be more convenient, though, and it may be the only option on some devices.
Edit:
Also, if you are not using wired connections, you'll want to make sure your Wifi is pretty fast. I'm using a fairly entry level eero system from a few years ago, and I found wireless to be pretty useless for streaming anything except slower paced games.
I do use Ethernet for all my devices at home.
Aside from Moonlight and Sunshine, Parsec also works well and is easy to set up, but it's proprietary.
There was a topic earlier this year about remote desktop programs that you might find useful:
And a topic about Moonlight specifically:
I don’t mind proprietary if it’s good and doesn’t have a monthly fee. Seems like Parsec is free for personal use.
Honestly, the only reason I even still mention Parsec is because its text rendering quality is ever so slightly better than the alternatives.
Or at least, it was when I tested it a few years ago while attempting a playthrough of Aurora4X. If you aren't playing text heavy eye torture games then I reckon Moonlight and Sunshine should work fine.
I use sunshine + moonlight a lot, mostly as a rdp replacement, but also do some gaming. It's fantastic. I use it with several connect/disconnect scripts + virtual display driver.
awesome-sunshine pre scrub
I guess Nonary pissed in ReenigneArcher's wheaties ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯, half of my hooks are from Nonary so I'm linking the commit prior to their removal from the listSomething tangentially related, Via by Venusoft is a pretty nifty piece of kit that allows you to "stream" Steam games without having to download it beforehand. I have oodles of storage so it's not necessary for me, but I did try it out and it works super well.
Honestly they can do a better job explaining this so here's the rub:
Via virtualizes your Steam library, downloading only what you need when you need it. The game runs completely locally on your hardware, so there is no added input latency or degraded image quality due to video compression like you'd see on traditional cloud gaming services.
https://venusoft.net/