I recently bought myself a new laptop so me and my partner can still do computer stuff when we are in the living room and I’m away from my desktop. As I didn’t want and couldn’t afford a gaming laptop I planed to use game streaming from my desktop so I could play games with decent quality.
Below is my experiences of each option that I tried.
Steamlink/Steam remote play
Steam offers has two methods for game streaming from one local machine to another. The first of these is the steamlink app/application that can run on Windows, Linux (both PC & Raspberry Pi) and Android. I’ve found this to work really well although I did have some issues with the wifi on my PC so using a wired ethernet adapter can work a bit better. Quality can be pretty much identical to running it on a local PC (apart from my laptop not getting so hot).
The steam application can also use do streaming internally. The only problem I found with this was that you need to be logged in on the host machine or you just get a blank screen. This can be solved by either using a VNC client or using the steam link application.
Moonlight and Sunshine (if you have a AMD gfx card)
Moonlight emulates the nvidia game streaming as used on the nvidia shield. This offers very good quality and you can also pair it with the sunshine streaming server if you don’t have an Nvidia graphics card. The main issue I have with it though is that it doesn’t work well with my WiFi. I suspect this is due to having spikes of requiring a lot of bandwith that our WiFi can’t handle. Over a wired ethernet connection however it works very well.
Xbox cloud gaming
This differs from the above options in that games are streamed from a server in a data centre rather than you own hardware. In order to use it your require a XBox game pass ultimate subscription and you can only play the XBox version of the games available for cloud gaming. Quality is limited by only support 720p resolution and I saw some graphics glitching. I did find it useful for trying new games without downloading them to either of my PCs and it might be a good option for playing away from home.