I’m extremely interested in the prospect of self-hosted cloud gaming. Has anyone had any success with any specific platforms, such as Sunshine + Moonlight? Any ins/outs to the necessary software or hardware?
For home LAN use on the Steam Deck, the built in Steam streaming is very usable now and much much better than it used to be.
I use my friend’s Sunshine setup which is setup on a different continent. The lag is tolerable but maybe it’s because of my shitty connection. But otherwise the setup works fine. My friend uses it inside their house and there is zero lag.
I have installed sunshine and moonlight on every computer I own and I use it so often I barely remember what computer I’m actually on anymore.
Its not “the Cloud” if its your own systems from top-to-bottom … More like Remote Play? … Seems Sony, Microsoft, and Valve all use that terminology for Streaming Gameplay from their consoles to another device.
Streaming to another location than where your Server is setup is tricky, mostly due to latency and establishing a connection that doesn’t get throttled(or compromised) by the ISPs involved. Personally, when I tried to get into it, about 10 years ago, I didn’t have the budget for a GPU that could be persuaded to support it at all.
Today, I’m more likely to keep such a server in my vehicle(on Battery/Solar), so its always just a local connection away, if I were to bother with the budget and hassle involved*. Around the house, I’ll just slap a new desktop together where I want to play games, or game on my laptop, and call it done.
*Ideally, I could build this for less than my good laptop would cost to replace, and use something much closer to outright disposable to game outside of my car. In practice, I just bring my good laptop with me everywhere, risk be damned.
Well…The cloud is just another persons pc.
Games on Whales has worked really well for me: https://games-on-whales.github.io/
Is it better than Sunshine?
They don’t do the same thing: Sunshine is intended to stream a single physical desktop.
Games on Whales runs headlessly and creates virtual desktops for each session in a Docker environment.
For example, you can create an instance that runs at 800p so you can stream to your Steam Deck at its native resolution. You can even still use your desktop normally since the streams run in the background.
Both of them support connection via Moonlight.
I’m very interested in Games on Whales. Are there any hardware implications with this approach? IE, does it perform better with consumer or pro Nvidia GPUs? I assume decause it’s using Docker, the more RAM the better.
I’m running this on a 7900 XTX with 32GB RAM. No issues so far. According to their instructions, Nvidia is a little bit more involved but it should perform the same on consumer or pro GPUs.
I assume decause it’s using Docker, the more RAM the better.
Docker has pretty much no overhead, so you only need enough RAM to run the games/sessions you want to run in addition to your regular desktop.
