So recently, since upgrading my GPU in my main gaming desktop and because some games I have (Rust being one of them) has EAC anticheat and will only run under Windows (at the time of writing) I've been getting interested in streaming my games from my gaming rigs to lower end PCs in my home or streaming from a Windows machine to Linux to run games only playable under Windows. I've always used to use Steam's game streaming ability to do this.

I mainly got into streaming games from my gaming PCs because I own and admin a Rust game server and although Facepunch (the game developer) has stated intentions for one day supporting playing it on Valve's Steam Deck they still have not done it yet and who knows when or if they will. But I still have a server to administrate so I have to be in the game to catch cheaters if they show up. To work around this, I'd have my older gaming rig run windows and I'd use Steam's game streaming to play on my laptop from my desktop. It worked well enough for admin responsibilities, but Steam's streaming software only works with steam games and if I wanted to stream Rust from my laptop I'd have to sign out of my main account on steam and sign into my admin account to stream it (effectively meaning I couldn't play a steam game on one account and be playing steam games on my main account. It's that reason I started looking at alternatives.

So I stumbled across the open source projects Moonlight and Sunshine. Moonlight was originally made as an open source frontend to Nvidia's Game Streaming (since then Nvidia has been stating their intent to kill it off) and is meant to be compatible. Sunshine is meant to be an open source game stream hosting software that Moonlight can connect to and (at least under Linux at the time of writing) supports hardware encoding on my AMD video card via VA-API or software Encoding (there is other encoders, but they don't apply to my hardware right now).

I've actually enjoyed Moonlight and Sunshine quite a lot. When given a high enough bandwidth threshold and some tweaks to settings I've found that the game almost feels like it's natively running on your computer (granted I'm talking about streaming over my LAN not internet. It's accomplished what I wanted which was to be able to stream Rust from a windows PC and have it be on another monitor to catch cheaters while playing other games. I'm honestly impressed with sunshine and its ability.