A few weeks ago I posted a video about Nvidia sunsetting their “Gamestream” feature on the Nvidia Shield TV that allows for personal streaming of games from a PC. It worked exceptionally well especially as it would automatically adjust settings for supported games to best fit the display the Shield was connected to.
While the Shield TV was the only officially supported device for Gamestream an open source project called Moonlight brought the feature to many other devices including tablets and smartphones. Many were concerned that the demise of Gamestream would also spell the end of Moonlight.
But a companion project called Sunshine was launched to provide an open source replacement to the streaming server provided by Nvidia. In my latest video I took Sunshine out for a spin to see how it compares to the soon-to-be-dead Nvidia option.
The bottom line is that Sunshine delivers a high quality image with very little latency. But it lacks all of the creature comforts that made Nvidia Gamestream work as seamlessly as it did. Among the challenges I encountered were adding Xbox Gamepass games that I downloaded along with having to manually set the resolution for each game I was playing off of a 16:10 gaming laptop.
But I see a lot of potential here – not only for gaming but also for just general high performance desktop screen sharing. Sunshine is completely free and open source and can sit safely behind a firewall. Most of the other solutions that offer its level of performance are wrapped around a subscription service that allows outside access.
I am sure we’ll be revisiting it in the future so stay tuned!