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Something Went Wrong Try Again Later Geforce

BRIEF GUIDE: Moonlight (nVidia GeForce Experience / GameStream) free in-home/over-internet streaming, better than Steam Link! With Steam Big Picture trick in guide!

If you've got an nVidia card (required), this is the best streaming experience.

What is Moonlight:

  • It's a 3rd party, open source receiver for nVidia's "Shield TV" / GeForce Experience game streaming protocol.

  • Exists for Android, iOS, tvOS (Apple TV), ChromeOS, Windows, Linux and Mac. In other words, for every OS!

  • There's even an app port for Valve's Steam Link hardware device, if you own one of those.

  • Depending on your receiver device, the experience will be as good as a real Shield TV box. Your device should be able to decode 60 FPS, preferably H.265 @ 60 FPS with HDR.

  • Perfect support for pretty much all game controllers (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, and PS4, and lots more). But note that you can pair your controller with the host PC instead, which is what I do. As long as you are within Bluetooth range (which I am), it makes sense to pair the controller to the PC for direct input. (By comparison, Steam Link has terrible gamepad support, by the way.)

Why is it better than Steam Link:

  • Created by nVidia with a proprietary protocol for lowest-latency gaming. The graphics card internally captures and encodes its own video frames with zero roundtrips to the CPU which means incredibly low latency. nVidia has also been accused of throttling performance of competing apps, which is another of the many reasons why nVidia's solution has the lowest latency.

  • Only solution that supports HDR streaming. As long as your receiving device reports that it supports HDR, the GPU goes into HDR mode. Looks amazing to see proper HDR without needing any HDMI cables.

  • Supports HEVC (H.265). Steam link does that too.

  • Supports up to 4K @ 60 FPS. Steam link does that too.

  • Supports up to 120 FPS, actually. The available stream modes are 30, 60, 90 or 120 FPS. But compatibility depends on the receiving device. (Steam link doesn't support this and is limited to 60 FPS.)

  • Supports 5.1 surround audio passthrough. Steam link does that too.

  • The picture quality is slightly better than Steam Link. This next sentence might trigger some people, but honestly I have to say it: I see no difference between nVidia's GameStream or direct HDMI connected to the TV. So I've stopped using HDMI cables. This is with Moonlight settings at 1080p, 60fps, 50 Mbit, HEVC, HDR, which is basically the settings for "max graphics quality streaming".

  • The encoding in this streaming protocol is incredible. There are no micro-stutters, unlike Steam Link which permanently micro-stutters (looks like low framerate and made me motion-sick) when I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on a 100mbit wired connection via Steam Link. With nVidia's GameStream, the gameplay is perfectly fluid. (And I'm using a RTX 2070, so it's not my graphics card. It's Steam Link that isn't good enough.)

  • Automatically optimizes the desktop resolution for the receiving device, to avoid wasting more bandwidth than necessary.

  • Latency example on my freaking PHONE (on home WiFi AC/N network): Frames are received in 0.3-2 milliseconds. The received H.265 frames are decoded on the receiver device (by the PHONE hardware) in ~25ms, which would be even faster if my receiver was faster. You can see all this by enabling the statistics overlay in Moonlight. So that's a total latency of less than 30ms, on a phone, over WiFi! Now imagine what your Android TV/wired device with powerful decoder hardware can do! My FireTV (not very powerful) in H.265 mode receives frames in 1.8ms and decodes them in 24ms. You can expect 10-30ms gameplay depending on your device! All of which is fast enough that most musicians could record music with that kinda latency (15ish-30ish ms is pretty unnoticeable even for a musician trying to follow exact timings). Basically you will not notice any latency. Anything happening on the host PC will happen on your receiver at the exact same time!

Small setup guide:

  • Install Moonlight on your client/receiver device. The Android app exists for most devices, even the FireTV's built-in store has Moonlight on it.

  • Read its quick start guide. Basically you just go to your computer, open GeForce Experience, go into Settings, then Shield, and then enable "GameStream".

  • You can add your games to the launcher menu, but I honestly prefer Steam's "Big Picture" menu. It's possible to add a direct shortcut to launching Big Picture. To do so, follow the separate guide below.

  • On your receiver device, simply connect to the device and it will ask you to type the PIN on your computer. Do this, and the devices will be paired. That's it!

  • You SHOULD go through the advanced Moonlight settings to change bitrate and resolution, enable H.265 (HEVC) video, HDR support, etc. But that's up to you and your particular setup/client app, etc. For example, on my Huawei P30 (modern Android phone with OLED display, HDR support etc), I went into advanced, "Change H.265 settings" and "Always use H.265", and ticked "Enable HDR". But all of those settings (whether they work or even exist) will depend on your devices!

  • You should also edit the "Video bitrate" setting in Moonlight. It defaults to just 20 Mbit (20000 Kbps), which is very low. It's just a "safe default" but it could give you a blurry image sometimes. But if your network can handle it, you should raise it. I went with 50 Mbit. (For comparison, Steam Link did some network testing when I used it and set itself to 100 Mbit, which is 5x more bandwidth, so obviously you should tweak Moonlight to a comparable number to ensure the image quality is good!)

  • The "Video resolution" defaults to 720p. You should definitely set that to 1080p, or higher if you can handle it.

  • Note that H.265 will not increase or decrease latency (on my devices, the time it takes to decode H.265 is the same as H.264). It simply increases picture quality while reducing bandwidth requirements. It's recommended that you use H.265 if your host PC and receiver both support it.

  • Be sure to set your TV to game mode (in its picture mode menu) to reduce your TV's input latency. By default, my LG TV's "standard" picture processing adds like 200ms. You obviously want the fastest possible picture mode when gaming, to ensure realtime latency. Otherwise the performance is gonna suck and it's gonna be your TV's fault. ;-)

(Extra information) If you use a touch-device as your client:

  • Use a three-finger tap to bring up the keyboard. Close the keyboard again via the Back button (or gesture) on your device.

  • If you are playing digital card games on your touch device, Steam Link is actually better because they have a "direct mouse tap" mode where the mouse goes to the location you tap on, which is helpful for card games. Moonlight can't offer that, because nVidia's "GameStream" protocol doesn't have that feature. So the only time I use Steam Link is when I play card games due to its "direct tap". For everything else, and for all non-touch devices, I use Moonlight (due to its superior performance).

(Extra information) Using gamepad controllers on Android-based clients:

  • Note that Android OS has no support for rumble commands. So you have to make a choice...

  • Either pair the controller to the Android device, which means that you have much longer range (you could even be in another place and connect to the host PC over the internet), but you won't get any rumble.

  • Or, pair the controller to the host PC, which works as long as you are within range of the PC. For me, Xbox One Bluetooth gamepad can pair with a PC that's about 4-5 meters away with no noticeable latency. And you get full rumble support. Others have claimed that much longer ranges work too, but it will depend on how strong the bluetooth receiver/transmitter in your host PC is!

Adding Steam Big Picture to nVidia GameStream:

  • This is highly recommended because it means you can enjoy a nice Steam game menu without any need to manually add individual games to GameStream. (And yes, there's a default "Steam" entry in GameStream already, but it doesn't open the nice Big Picture interface! That's what this guide solves.)

  • You're going to need to make a .bat file, because nVidia GameStream does not support adding "command line switches" to programs. So we'll have to code it ourselves.

  • Open Notepad and type the following code: start "Steam Big Picture" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -start steam://open/bigpicture

  • Go to File - Save As, and set "Save as type" dropdown to "All files" (IMPORTANT), then navigate anywhere you wanna save this launcher and name the file "Steam Big Picture.bat". I chose to save mine on the desktop.

  • Try double-clicking on that file. If it launches Steam Big Picture, you're done. If not, you did something wrong and should redo the above steps.

  • Now go into GeForce Experience's GameStream settings, and click the Add button and navigate your "Steam Big Picture.bat" file. Add it.

  • And if you want a nice cover art (I do), just click Edit on the added link and click on the Box Art image. Apply any image you want, but note that it should be in portrait orientation, so for a really nice result you will probably have to use a photo editor to crop the image. The image should be ~1.435x taller than its width. For example, I took a 1280x720 steam logo wallpaper, and then did 720 / 1.435 = ~502, meaning I should make a 502x720 image. Then I was super lazy and went to https://www.iloveimg.com/crop-image, uploaded the image, and typed in 502x720 and placed the selection where I wanted it. The result was this image, if you wanna be more lazy than I was and just re-use my boxart: https://i.imgur.com/KEQxKEa.jpg

  • Aight, enjoy! Now you can be lazy and just launch Steam Big Picture from your client devices, and from there you have your perfect Steam menu to select all your games, rather than having to add each game individually to GameStream. And as you probably know, you can add non-steam games to steam so that you can launch those via its Big Picture menu too!

  • Note that if you've enabled Moonlight's HDR option, you will see a small notification when you launch Steam Big Picture saying "This game does not support HDR", and the stream will be running in non-HDR mode.

Running games in HDR

  • If you have HDR-streaming capable hardware (seems to need GeForce GTX 1000 series or later) and a game that supports it, then you can stream in HDR.

  • To do that, you must add the game individually to the GameStream launcher, because HDR is negotiated/detected at the launch of the app/game you start. So, as mentioned above, Steam's Big Picture will not be running in HDR, and neither will any games launched via that session.

  • That being said... HDR isn't super necessary. Even without HDR, the OLED screen of my phone makes Red Dead Redemption 2 look lifelike.

Have fun!

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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/comments/dusfcq/brief_guide_moonlight_nvidia_geforce_experience/

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