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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

Slightly tangential, do you think Moonlight (with say Sunshine) is good enough for proper work? I've used a few "second screens" apps like spacedesk on my iPad but generally when the resolution is good enough for text, it's too laggy for scrolling (and vice-versa).

(For more details, I'm planning to stream from an old laptop after turning it into a hackintosh. I'm hoping staying on the home network's going to help with latency.)

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Absolutely yes, especially if you use a GPU with a recent video encoder.

I have all my PCs connected to each other via Moonlight+Sunshine and the latency on the local network is unnoticeable. I code on my Linux workstation from my laptop, play games on the gaming PC from my workstation, etcetera and it is all basically perfect.

Thank you! When you say GPU with a recent video encoder, do you mean them separately (i.e. don't use software/cpu streaming; and use an efficient encoder), or do you mean use a GPU that supports recent encoders? I'm afraid my Intel HD 520 isn't particularly new and likely doesn't support modern encoders.

A GPU with a dedicated encoder for x264 or preferably x265/AV1. You can do without it, but you'll spend a core or two on software encoding and the overhead will add a few tens of ms of lag.

With full hardware capture and encode (default on windows, can require tweaking on Linux ) it's virtually free resource-wise.

You're off by one letter: the codec is h264/h265. x264 and x265 are the CPU encoding softwares for the codec.

Without a doubt! I use moonlight for ten+ hours a week. I never use it for gaming and it never failed once.

Thanks, that's great to hear/know! Would you be okay sharing your hardware (CPU/GPU) setup on the server (Sunshine) side? Thanks!

Yes. I host both on my NixOS desktop that has a 13900KF and an RTX4080 (using nvenc and AV1), as well as from my MacBook Pro M3 Pro.

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