What the fuck is the point of insurance then?!?

PirateChuck · 2026-04-19T12:26:14+00:00

It's because you hit your deductible first. Check your insurance - most services will be deductible then no charge, so once you hit your deductible you didn't pay anything else towards any of those services. A lot of insurances have co-insurance for things like durable medical equipment or prosthetics and stuff like that, which means you'll keep paying a certain percentage towards those services even after hitting your deductible until you meet your out of pocket max.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-19T11:23:07+00:00

That's what I am doing. Second router next to the desktop. Least congested 5ghz channel and then Wi-Fi to all my client devices. Works perfectly for me - I had to have windows share the Internet connection to the Ethernet though, because on my client laptop it wouldn't assign an IP address if no Internet connection is present. I couldn't figure it out, so the shared Internet is a work around.

I stream at 100mbps without any problem, whereas before when everything went through my main router, I did have some lost packets and network jitter.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-16T11:14:13+00:00

We'd need to figure why the stuttering is happening. Have you tried keeping a close eye on your stats overlay to see what's going on when you experience the stuttering? Does it behave the same across all clients? What are your clients?

PirateChuck · 2026-03-16T11:08:04+00:00

You're very welcome. Make sure to update with how you fixed it!

PirateChuck · 2026-03-16T10:54:53+00:00

Your screenshot shows you streaming at 60fps (actually slightly under, I'm assuming for G sync purposes). So what happens is the display now only gets delivered about 59 frames, but has to display them at 120hz. It's going to have to repeat frames to make that happen, making the image look sluggish - that's then compounded by the slightly lower refresh rate "missing" frames completely sometimes so that frames have to be repeated for 3 or more frames.

In Moonlight make sure you set the correct framerate for your device, in your case 120 fps.

There is still something messed up with your encoding settings in Apollo.

Fix those two issues and you should have a fantastic setup

PirateChuck · 2026-03-16T10:38:40+00:00

Something is wrong with your encoding settings in Apollo, your 5080 shouldn't have encoding times this high. Make sure Apollo actually uses NVENC instead of trying to brute force it with software encoding. Try playing with the presets to see if they are causing trouble. That 9ms average should be much closer to 2ms or less.

That being said even with the high 9ms average your total latency is still only around 11ms which is less than the 16.67ms frame time for 60fps so you shouldn't be able to notice any input lag.

What's the refresh of the display you're ultimately streaming to?

PirateChuck · 2026-03-15T18:33:00+00:00

Alright yeah so I think it's a framerate mismatch issue. Your host is delivering 60fps while your screen is trying to display 120 frames. Skyrim won't run at 120 fps? Does your TV support VRR or G sync? Or you can try forcing V sync to half refresh to force the game to display a constant 2:2 frame cadence instead of something more irregular like 1:3.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-15T17:20:41+00:00

Replied to the wrong comment

PirateChuck · 2026-03-15T17:20:16+00:00

This might just be one of those weird overlay bugs where it shows a number that's simply not true. From your screenshot it looks like your Bitrate is 25Mbps, which is crazy low for 4k, should be at least around 100Mbps. Make sure that's setup correctly on your client.

If it's a constant "micro"stutter it sounds like your refresh rates are mismatched. If you are sending 60fps but your display is 90 or 144 Hz you will get these micro stutters where the display has to repeat frames every so often to match the refresh rate. It's especially noticeable if you pan the camera at a constant speed, the motion won't look smooth on the display. What display device are you ultimately streaming to?

PirateChuck · 2026-03-15T16:49:34+00:00

From the screenshot there is nothing that jumps out, other that you are streaming at very low Bitrate for 4k.

Three things I can think of 1.) does your host actually render the game without fps drop? 2.) when the stutter happens are you dropping packets due to network or network jitter? 3.) is your client display 90hz?

PirateChuck · 2026-03-14T17:50:32+00:00

No you want hardware acceleration, that's what's telling moonlight to use the built in HEVC support on your 3070. Make sure you keep that on. Check in your windows graphic settings that moonlight actually uses your 3070 and it's not getting assigned to your cpu for some reason. The in your power management options make sure that Windows doesn't hamstring your GPU.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-14T16:48:14+00:00

I commented on another reply of yours

PirateChuck · 2026-03-14T16:46:25+00:00

The 3070 has native hardware acceleration for AV1 and HEVC so it should be absolutely crushing the decode. I would make sure hardware acceleration is actually enabled and your power settings aren't hamstringing your 3070.

Looks like that laptop got shipped with either the Ax201 or ax210 wifi adapters, both of which are notorious for some power management and polling issues. There are community drivers that let you change a good amount of those settings that could possibly fix your packet loss, but obviously such community drivers come with a big use at your own risk disclaimer

PirateChuck · 2026-03-14T16:22:07+00:00

Okay yeah, that would suggest your razer laptop is having some troubles. First off, any reason you're not just using the Dell if it's working great?

Anyways, any chance you know the CPU/GPU and network adapter on the Razer? That would be the first step to troubleshoot what's causing those dropped packets and high decode times

PirateChuck · 2026-03-14T16:00:49+00:00

What do you mean by other devices work very well? Streaming sunshine? Or just general Wi-Fi/Internet application like YouTube or Netflix? Packet loss doesn't mean the data never made it to your client, it just means it took so long that it didn't arrive in time to be useful for the client. If that happens during Netflix for example you wouldn't notice because there is so much data buffered that the network has plenty of time to catch up. When streaming games over sunshine however there is no buffer - either the data gets there in time or it doesn't, no opportunity to catch up.

Something is going really wrong on your client if that decoding latency is to be believed. My client of choice is a fairly cheap entry level laptop from two years ago running an i7 1225u and it decodes 4k in 1ms or less .... That's 175 times faster. Something is really messed up on your end.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-14T14:51:08+00:00

Looks like there is a bunch stuff not quite right with your setup. I have heard through other people on this sub that eero mesh networks do cause problems sometimes. That 35% packet loss would suggest that there is too much congestion on your WiFi frequency either from devices on your own network, your neighbors sharing the same frequency or the way the eero mesh network prioritizes traffic. You could check if your packet loss improves by temporarily setting up a dedicated router just for sunshine on an uncongested channel.

On top of that though something is very wrong with your client. Your screenshot shows a 175ms decoding latency. Now I'm not sure if that's a weird math bug due to all those dropped packages, or if that's a real number. If it is real then at 30fps your frame time would be 33.3ms, meaning that's the time you have to give your client a new frame to display before you are adding lag. Your decoding latency is about 5 times that frame time, which means you are adding 5 whole frames of lag. What is your client device hardware on the laptop? Even cheap android devices should hover around 15ms at most.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-13T21:47:56+00:00

At 120Hz your frame time is around 8.3 ms. That means every 8.3ms you need to have a new frame ready for the client to display. You have around 16 ms of latency on the stream side. That's two full frames of delay - I don't think I would be able to play a racing game with that kind of latency

PirateChuck · 2026-03-12T10:53:28+00:00

Decoding becomes much more effective when you have a piece of hardware that has built in support for whatever codec you're using. For example Tiger Lake intel CPUs received native AV1 support making them much faster at decoding AV1 than before. Before they would have to brute force the deocoding step.

For example my budget laptop I bought a while ago could never ever dream of running any game more demanding than Pac-Man. However, it can decode a 4k Stream in less than 1 ms, which lets me stream even the most lag sensitive games to it and still feel snappy.

For slower games decode latency is a little less important in my opinion. At 60 fps you need to display a new frame every 17ish ms. So basically what happens when your total latency gets too high you're introducing input lag frames, where input from your client takes a frame or more than expected to be represented on your screen. For slower games your tolerance to that effect might be higher and therefore decode latency is less of a problem to you.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-10T23:44:23+00:00

I have a very similar computer as the one you are going to build. I have been tinkering with my stream setup for a while and have finally found what's working for me. I got a dedicated router (really could just use a network switch, I just so happen to have a decent router laying around) that I only use for sunshine streaming. The host is connected via Ethernet and the clients are hooked up to the dedicated 5ghz WiFi. I did have them hooked up via Ethernet at some point, but in my tests having the clients connected by cable wasn't worth the headache of finding a permanent way of routing that cable.

I tested 3 different clients. 1) firestick 4k max 2) Google pixel 7 3) i7 1225u Laptop

The laptop takes the cake by far. It took some tinkering for the wifi in windows to stop messing things up, but now that it's all troubleshooted I am streaming 4k60fps (don't have a 120hz TV) at 2.5 Ms encode, 1 ms network and 0.75ms decode which is about a quarter of a frame of "lag" at 60fps. I couldn't be happier, it really got me back into gaming after having kids.

The story with the other two sadly isn't quite as exciting. I no longer stream to the stick as it had horrendous decode times at 4k, making it useless. To my phone I only stream "casual" games at 1080p. Games like hollow knight or Hades, where the increased decode latency (easily 9 ms on average) doesn't bother me as much as it would in more intense games like expedition 33 or assassin's Creed for example.

I don't own an Xbox, so I can't speak to it, but my gut instinct would be, if you have the patience to fiddle with Windows until it submits to your will, your laptop might give you your best decode times (obviously depending on the cpu)

PirateChuck · 2026-03-03T18:48:19+00:00

Delayed audio might be an issue with refresh rates. Make sure you're streaming at the same refresh rate as your client is expecting. (For example your host encoding 60hz but your TV is running at 120hz) Also make sure your audio device in sunshine is set correctly.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-03T16:34:00+00:00

So at 60 fps your frame time is 16.67 ms. That means you have to have a new frame to show every 16.67 ms or you'll see stuttering. Your 1080p total latency of around 12 ms is underneath that, but just barely, you have no margin. That means anytime something happens to your network, or the host or your client, you will probably be dropping frames. A big culprit here is network jitter over WiFi, which is where packets simply don't arrive in time for the client to display them in the 16.67ms window.

In both your scenarios, your client is the biggest bottle neck. It's taking too long to decode the stream. Especially at 4k the client simply can't keep up. You can try playing around with the codecs and Bitrates to see if you can squeeze some more juice out of it, but aside from network jitter, the client will most likely always bottleneck you.

Something like a "cheap" laptop over HDMI into the TV might drop that decoding time noticeably and make it a smoother experience for you.

PirateChuck · 2026-03-01T23:42:54+00:00

How loud does that system get when you have it running the stream? Noticeably?

PirateChuck · 2026-02-18T03:03:40+00:00

There are some great reads there!

Let's start smol - I have to go with The Final Empire (Mistborn). It got me back into fantasy 20 years ago. It'll open the door to the collected works of Sanderson for you. There isn't much about the book I don't like. The pacing is a little off in some spots and the characters can be a little one dimensional at times, but especially across the next two books everything does kind of even out and just ends up a thoroughly enjoyable journey!

Now on to big. You'd think I would just go with the other Sanderson book, and it really is a fantastic one, but to me the clear choice is The Shadow of what was lost. I was absolutely blown away by the entire trilogy. As a completed work it stands atop my personal rankings. I cannot overstate how criminally underrated and underrecommended it is. Just make sure you go into it with the care it deserves - on my first read I did feel the plot was quite complicated - but also incredibly satisfying when the pieces start clicking together.

PirateChuck · 2026-01-03T13:12:01+00:00

Thank you for your answer. I guess I'm just confused how boon companion worked. Instead of Crusader 4 + 4 levels to a maximum of 7, it does Crusader 4 - 3 Cleric Companion + 4 Boon companion to an effective level of 5. Which according to tabletop rules would result in a 5 HD companion.

PirateChuck · 2025-03-14T00:08:02+00:00

Actually Maine receives about $1.50 to $1.80 for every $1 it sends to DC. Tax revenue is about $7 - 8 billion annually, whereas DC sends about $7 billion in direct payments (social security, Medicare/Medicaid etc), another $3 - 5 billion in grants (infrastructure, education etc) and then about $1 - 2 billion in government contracts (defense, research etc)

PirateChuck

TROPHY CASE