Why is the Moonlight streaming app so much smoother on Android compared to the Steam Link app?

[GameZone]

I mean, we`re talking about the same network, phone and computer. The Moonlight app for my Android device is so smooth, while the Steam Link app is a slow motion mess. There clearly has to be some sort of software technology on Moonlight that is way better than Steam has to offer.

[DirtyCamper]

I don't think moonlight works if you don't have an nvidia card, as the protocol and application is NVidia proprietary.
And yes, NVidia knows of course the best place in their driver to catch and encode the picture.
Did you also notice that if you turn off the proprietary nvidia gamestream, the steam in house streaming suddenly works a lot better?

[GameZone]

Originally posted by DirtyCamper:

I don't think moonlight works if you don't have an nvidia card, as the protocol and application is NVidia proprietary.
And yes, NVidia knows of course the best place in their driver to catch and encode the picture.
Did you also notice that if you turn off the proprietary nvidia gamestream, the steam in house streaming suddenly works a lot better?

Nvidia proprietary gamestream? Where?

[DirtyCamper]

Originally posted by GameZone:

Nvidia proprietary gamestream? Where?

It's somewhere in your nvidia settings.
Moonlight is the reversed engineered variant of the proprietary gamestream protocol for the client side.
The lore is that if you can play using moonlight, it means you have nvidia gamestream turned on.
Having gamestream turned on will impact the speed of the steam capture compositor.
So somewhere in your settings on your windows system you have to turn that off.
Steam's method only uses open API's to capture, encode and stream. And it works cross platform.

[kshots]

Wow... I had this same observation and was getting frustrated to the point that I was getting started looking into it. All my steam streaming was becoming absolutely worthless (have to reduce resolution, low frame rates, input jitter), yet my moonlight streaming was beautiful, smooth, and running at full 4k. And yet... it hasn't always been this way. When I first started using steam streaming, it was flawless.

So your explanation makes sense to me. Something nVidia is doing is getting in the way and degrading the steam streaming capability. Or could be... bearing in mind I haven't had the ability to verify this. It seems likely to me, though.

Unfortunately, I have use-cases where I really need moonlight... so I won't be disabling it. I'll have to get used to using their MSTC.exe accelerated remote desktop "hack" to get my full library.

[GameZone]

Originally posted by kshots:

Wow... I had this same observation and was getting frustrated to the point that I was getting started looking into it. All my steam streaming was becoming absolutely worthless (have to reduce resolution, low frame rates, input jitter), yet my moonlight streaming was beautiful, smooth, and running at full 4k. And yet... it hasn't always been this way. When I first started using steam streaming, it was flawless.

So your explanation makes sense to me. Something nVidia is doing is getting in the way and degrading the steam streaming capability. Or could be... bearing in mind I haven't had the ability to verify this. It seems likely to me, though.

Unfortunately, I have use-cases where I really need moonlight... so I won't be disabling it. I'll have to get used to using their MSTC.exe accelerated remote desktop "hack" to get my full library.

Parsec will probably offer the same experience, if not better than Moonlight.

[JlnPrssnr]

Have you tried switching between the different host encoding options to see if one performs better on your system? In Steam, go to Steam (top left corner) -> settings -> remote play -> advanced host options

[slouken]

You can turn on Performance Details in the advanced streaming settings to find out what's happening, but it sounds like you are running local streaming with a congested wireless network. Remote Play only does dynamic bitrate adjustment on internet streaming, but you can try tuning the bandwidth yourself in the advanced streaming settings. The quick way to see if there's improvement is to switch from Balanced or Beautiful to "Fast" in the streaming settings and see if that makes a difference.

[kshots]

In my case, I have it set to "dynamically adjust capture resolution" (which is about to be unset) along with the nVidia-specific hardware acceleration. Everything else is unchecked. On the client side, I have it set to "beautiful" on the client-side options. So yeah... everything's maxed out.

That said, the host is a coffee lake i5 (desktop) with a RTX 2080 Ti, forced to run XCom2 at 1024x768 with most options turned off (runs fine @ 4k, all maxed via moonlight). The client is another coffee lake i7 (mobile) with an RTX 2060. I'd expect if anything would work smoothly, that pair should.

The network is hardwired 1 gigabit via an old Dell PowerConnect managed switch with very little traffic on it.

[GameZone]

Originally posted by slouken:

You can turn on Performance Details in the advanced streaming settings to find out what's happening, but it sounds like you are running local streaming with a congested wireless network. Remote Play only does dynamic bitrate adjustment on internet streaming, but you can try tuning the bandwidth yourself in the advanced streaming settings. The quick way to see if there's improvement is to switch from Balanced or Beautiful to "Fast" in the streaming settings and see if that makes a difference.

Some games ran much better on Moonlight, regardless if it was wired or not. Sonic Mania had much better and smoother FPS on wired Moonlight VS Steam Link. There has been a few updates to Steam Link and my Asus router since then, and now its smooth.

As for congested wireless network, maybe. It`s difficult for me to run a wired network in my house, so I've updated to a WiFi 6 network card and router in order to ensure that I have the latest technology at least. Do Wifi 6 VS Wifi 5 even matter?