I get better latency and frame rate than GeForce Now on a 2660 using moonlight. Using h.265 or AV1 is necessary. I'm not familiar with Presec, but I'll bet it's defaulting to h.264.
The reason they're likely seeing latency issues is that Parsec doesn't have the localized servers that GeForce Now has. Servers closer to your location will always have lower latency.
This is a simple case of nVidia simply having more money, more servers, and better infrastructure than Parsec. Which isn't surprising given the scale and cashflow difference of the two companies.
It might be bouncing around through the net somehow instead of transferring directly within my local network? I wonder if something about local peer-to-peer discovery isn't working properly?
Maybe that's also happening to the other person comparing GeForce Now to Parsec?
I have to say, I love the way Parsec works and allows you to use your whole library (since it doesn't stream the game, but it streams your whole desktop). But if there is ever a service that allows you to get the same thing including remote servers (since I travel), I would probably switch.
I’m going to do some more Parsec experiments this weekend thanks to your info.
Something is clearly wrong with my setup, I’m going to figure it out.
- Make sure you run hardware acceleration, you can see if this is applied after opening a connection and checking the details. Without acceleration it will be terrible. This can either be as simple as enabling it or possibly you need the monitor below.
- Make sure a monitor is plugged in (there might be a way around this, but I just bought a $4 HDMI dummy instead of trying to figure out how to do this the software way)
Edit: formatting
If the actual communications between two clients is P2P then, by definition, the VPN is P2P. Because that's the actual part people are talking about when they talk about VPNs.
Relays are involved only briefly initially.
Parsec will discover servers on LAN and/or with a port open and display them as distinct entries in the connection list, usually positioned in front of the central server options.
So there's no default as you're always the one choosing.
Parsec displays computers to connect to. If a hole can be punched, it will use a P2P connection. If not, it automatically falls back to their STUN servers or the Parsec Relay server if you're on the Teams plan. There is no "server" to choose from. There aren't multiple entries for a single computer with different connection options. I don't know where you hallucinated all of these things but that's just not how Parsec works.
This article makes it quite clear that P2P is the default with a fallback to STUN: https://support.parsec.app/hc/en-us/articles/4440911373325-P...
I opened the app and looked at it. I distinctly remember there being multiple entries if a computer is on the local network. I don't have another computer on the network right now so I can't check.
Capture method can have a big effect on latency and technologies like the Desktop Duplication API or NV FBC are also necessary for achieving lower latencies by minimising data transfer between cpu and the gpu when capturing and encoding.