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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use their deck as a steam link box?

I've had mixed success with apple tv (including newest model) when feeding a 4K TV (no 120 Hz support, decoding chokes on resolutions above 1440p regardless of encoded bitrate). I have a 13700k+3070, so it's not for want of encoding horsepower.

The most common use case of the deck is similar to mine of the link: couch gaming. It might be nice to free up the living room TV and have a max res/max framerate solution on the deck with little power usage. My main concern is latency. I have scanned through all setting permutations and I can't get what feels like a sub 100 ms experience on an apple tv decoder even when the telemetry reports sub 25 ms end-to-end latency. Now that I think about it again maybe it's the TV not being in game mode.

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Have you looked into Moonlight? Nvidia is sunsetting GeForce Experience which would be a convenient streaming server, but Sunshine seems to be almost on par now, latency wise. So you‘d run Sunshine on your host machine, and Moonlight on the Steam Deck. I’ve seen people report a minimal input lag of just 1 frame @ 4k60 (with most recent Sunshine versions, there was a big leap recently) but haven’t tried it myself yet.

One big upside of Sunshine is that you can log into your host user remotely. So you could wake up the host with WoL and do the rest on the Deck.

Okay I've tried to use Moonlight today. It appears much more broken than Steam Link. There is no working autostart (but there is a broken service option), audio doesn't work, credentials sometimes just break to the point that a fresh start is needed, there is no way to elegantly exit the app, and it doesn't add the ability to unlock the PC (in fact, it even is so fragile that it requires a restart of the host program if the computer's primary display has turned off).

The options are nice and it sounds great on paper, but Steam Link is a better solution right now.

That login ability is nice. I usually have to use a second remote channel.

Does Moonlight handle controllers and surround sound well?

Moonlight only supports Xbox controllers or making a different controller (like a PS5 controller) appear to Windows to be an Xbox controller. You can't use a PS5 controller natively, instead windows sees the ps5 controller as an Xbox 360 controller.

It's fine for most cases but not for motion controls.

Haven’t tried it but vigembus should support PS4 controllers too: https://github.com/ViGEm/ViGEmBus

Not GP, but I use virtualhere to forward my steam controller over LAN to my desktop. Moonlight handles controllers fine, but it's forwarding button presses, not forwarding the USB device. This rarely makes a difference unless you're using peripherals that need software.

Yes, I use it constantly. But I use Moonlight instead of built-in streaming because it has proven to be more stable and performant.

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