Nvidia’s GameStream is dead. Sunshine and Moonlight are great replacements.

Nvidia’s GameStream, as the name suggests, had one job: streaming games from an Nvidia graphics card in your PC to an Nvidia Shield (or Shield tablet back then) connected to your TV. It did the job pretty well, was easy to set up, and optimized the game with some custom stream smoothing. Now Nvidia is removing GameStream from Shield devices, but there are already better DIY game streaming solutions available. Take a look at it and talk to the developers about why and how they made it.

Nvidia done with local streaming

Nvidia says that with the Shield update coming this month, “GameStream functionality will no longer be available in apps.” Even if I try to skip the Shield update, GameStream stops working at some point (maybe removed from his GeForce Experience app in Windows). In the meantime, trying to avoid that update means not using one of Nvidia’s recommended replacements, GeForce Now, with Shield, and taking advantage of all the other update fixes and features offered in System Update. lose.

If you’re a Shield owner like me, this stinks. Shield devices have their own merits, having the longest and most consistent update stream of any Android/Google TV device ever released. receive. They still work perfectly as stream boxes (and even more attractive if Google lands an NFL package). But the huge benefits of having both a Shield and a GeForce graphics card quickly wear off.

Steam Link, the company’s proposed local streaming alternative, is a fairly straightforward option. If all the games you want to play are on Steam, you have good performance, and you have a client for your system. We found Steam Link to be a bit more cumbersome to set up resolution and controller options, and its network reliability was (relatively, subjectively) less robust than newer alternatives. I admit that in some settings, Steam Link lags behind the proprietary streaming codec by 10ms.

Another Nvidia proposal is GeForce Now. While very impressive in the upper tiers, it only offers a limited portion of your game library. It requires a good broadband connection and a monthly subscription, and serves far fewer clients (especially including Apple TV) than Moonlight.

Great Streaming Client: Moonlight

GameStream was meant to push Nvidia gear, but it also inspired the creation of the amazing Moonlight software. This free and open-source app has allowed people to access the output of his GeForce cards from any kind of screen since 2018. Marvel’s Midnight Sons on the iPad on the sofa elder ring I’m streaming from home on my Windows laptop at my in-laws’ house.

Moonlight allows you to send games from your Nvidia card in your Windows PC to Windows/Mac/Linux computers, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, Amazon FireOS devices and Raspberry Pi 4. , PlayStation Vita, Wii U, LG’s WebOS, and homebrew apps on other single-board computers. As mentioned above, this device doesn’t even need to be on your home network if you’ve set up your game streaming PC and network that way.

All that effort may have sunk when Nvidia retired GameStream as a service. Luckily, Moonlight works seamlessly with another, more flexible server, Sunshine.