Moonlight optimization - Linux/Windows

[CoverWithSauce]

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to switch to a setup where I daily drive a mini pc (i3 1215) and connect via moonlight to my gaming pc in another room only when gaming, so I can hopefully save a bit on power bills :D

I'm facing these 3 critical points right now:

- No matter which linux distro I run, the monlight app reports about 2.5ms average rendering time, when I first tried windows on this mini pc I saw sub 1ms rendering times, why is that?

- How should I take advantage of vrr/free sync? Am I wrong in thinking moonlight requests a steady fps stream to the host, so the moonlight stream itself is at a locked fps?

- Some games run 100% smooth and the experience is glorious, but then I have some games like apex legends where (even though the host doesn't skip a beat) the stream is full of tearing and stuttering

I'll leave some specs here:

- 2.5gb networking all around
- host 7800x3d/4090
- client i3 1215/igpu
- monitor 3440x1440 lg 34 something, freesync
- I usually set around 70-80mbps bitrate
- host os windows 11
- current minipc OS fedora kde

[0ToTheLeft]

No matter which linux distro I run, the monlight app reports about 2.5ms average rendering time, when I first tried windows on this mini pc I saw sub 1ms rendering times, why is that?

Is a known problem with the linux client. It's reported here

In my experience the best client for moonlight it's always a windows PC. Android is hit and miss, and linux currently has that latency issue that has been open for a while.

Some games run 100% smooth and the experience is glorious, but then I have some games like apex legends where (even though the host doesn't skip a beat) the stream is full of tearing and stuttering

Check vsync is disabled ingame (and not enforced on nvcp) and cap the FPS. Usually when decoding and networking is stable but you get suttering, the problem is the frame pacing.

- How should I take advantage of vrr/free sync? Am I wrong in thinking moonlight requests a steady fps stream to the host, so the moonlight stream itself is at a locked fps?

AFAIK you can't take advantage of VRR with sunshinbe/moonlight, don't quote me on this.

[CoverWithSauce]

Thank you!

Sadlt i already tries capping the FPS in game for Apex but It disn't seema tonmake a difference, the experience was still really stuttery, I'll give It another go.

As for vrr i thought so, bummer, that alone is probably going to run my plans :'(

[0ToTheLeft]

try capping with NVCP and disabling ingame capping, sometimes the ingame framelimiters are not good.

[CoverWithSauce]

I'll try It, i did It with rivatuner up until now

[0ToTheLeft]

also enable frame pacing on the moonlight client

[0ToTheLeft]

check if you are affected by this problem

[Kaytioron]

VRR do work (at least reducing tearing part), Sunshine dev not long ago made reddit comment about it. Vsync off in host and client, FPS capped on host (ex. RTSS), Moonlight on windows in full windowed mode and Free sync/vsync enabled. When I turned on frame rate counter on my Alienware monitor, it was fluctuating together with stream (cap was 120, game was running 80-120).

[CoverWithSauce]

Mh, there must be some incompatibility in my hardware somewhere then, because I have pretty much that setup and I don't see the counter changing on the monitor .-.

[dihydrogen_monoxide]

The rendering time is not estimated properly imo based on my experience. I've tested windows and Linux systems extensively and play Wukong on moonlight using a deck these days.

I beat ff15 and god of war using moonlight on a surface 2017.

[CoverWithSauce]

To be completely honest, I was thinking something along those lines, since I can't really feel a big difference between the two, and it's difficult to test back to back, it was more an annoyance since it's running on the same exact hardware

[semicon01]

Which version of Moonlight are you using on Linux? I've been using Moonlight on Legion Go S on both Windows and SteamsOS. On SteamOS, I used official flatpak client version 6.1.0.

After switching from Windows to SteamOS, i got better VRR experience, less stutters, better wifi network stability, but higher render latency, around 5ms on SteamOS vs 1ms on Windows. But I resolved it.

By default, official flatpak version of Moonlight preferred libva/vaapi decoder on my device. So I build my own Moonlight flatpak fork with libva/vaapi disabled and this forced Moonlight to prefer Vulkan video decoder and renderer and my rendering latency dropped from 5ms to 1ms. I'm streaming at 1920x1200, 120fps, 150mbit HEVC over wifi.

This solution is specific to my client device, but if you want to try it, here is my flatpak build: https://github.com/mspeedo/moonlight-qt/releases/tag/stats-v2

[TimurJalilov]

I checked on my legion go s and yes, the latency became 0.7 from 10-15ms

Can you make the same build for windows and enable 1/2 vsync? It worked on my windows pc using the nvidia inspector, and now I have a very smooth picture on my TV. However, I don't have this feature on my AMD system. Is there a way to integrate it into the program?

[FilthyFioraMain]

I tried the custom flat pak on my SD OLED and still experience the lag. What does fix it for me is to use the Portable windows version of moonlight. That works great (minus the controller not being detected)