Raspberry Pi 5 now supports Valve's Steam Link
raspberrypi.com
raspberrypi.com
If your server is Linux and you have an NVIDIA card, I would also recommend applying the NVFBC consumer card restriction removal patch[1] to your driver libraries to allow you to capture directly from the GPU rather than X11/Wayland. Sunshine will automatically detect this and use it and it reduces the latency even further.
However, NVIDIA say that "The NvFBC desktop capture library does not have native Wayland support and does not work with Xwayland" (https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/565.77/R...), so I guess it's of no use for Wayland users.
Sunshine / Moonlight was also briefly pitched at the end of Arstechnica's coverage of this RPi Steam Link, fwiw. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/the-raspberry-pi-5-no...
Highly recommended.
I switched to using my Steam Deck. Moonlight on a docked Steam Deck with Sunshine works perfectly with HDR on an Ethernet connection. The Steam Deck should also have better controller support than the Nvidia Shield- I've been using the official Xbox wireless adapter, there's a community supported driver to use it with the Steam Deck- a video on Youtube says how to get it working.
You can get a surprising amount of hardware to work as a game streaming frontend if your internet is fast enough. Moonlight-Switch is also interesting if you've got a jailbroken Switch sitting around like I do:
https://github.com/XITRIX/Moonlight-Switch
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9553519/135712658-...
Also it has easily-accesible GPIO and other interfaces like I2C, SPI, UART, etcetera.
I think the stronger argument/usecase is it's a drop-in replacement for the pi4. So if you're already dedicated to that form factor...
pi5 number go up
For anyone building a little homelab or whatever, especially in the US where triple the (low) power consumption from 3 to 9W+ isn't a big deal, a used SFF/mini PC is a better value proposition. Especially if you want to add storage, 2.5 Gbps networking, etc.
But for people integrating a computer into a larger project (robotics, automation, controls, etc.), or buying a little 'IoT' device to tinker with, buying used gear that is often much larger and usually requires a large external power brick might be a turn-off.
You can get an intel N100 box with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD for just over $100 now. Faster and cheaper than a comparable Pi 5. Uses a bit more power though.
Educated guess: Could add as much as $10 a year if its running continuously.
Doing so is absolutely disingenuous.
It's in a middle ground between Pi 4 (which is cheaper and can idle a tiny bit little lower) and N100 (which is nominally more expensive—varies greatly by region, but is faster with better IO and more compatibility, though integrating with GPIO-related stuff is more annoying). The CM5 makes more sense for a lot of use-case specific purchases though, like I upgraded my Home Assistant Yellow from CM4 to CM5 and the performance difference is noticeable.
Other manufacturers make much faster (and more efficient, though similarly-priced, accounting for performance) SBCs now, but the support side (e.g. I download an image and it runs 2, 3, 5, or 10 years from now) is much worse, unless you're used to hacking on Linux kernels and following device-specific forums to resolve your issues.
8GB pi5 is $80 Power brick around $15 Decent cooled case $20 Heat sink $8 SD $15-20 And this is all excluding NVMe hat with NVMe drive, ie you’re stuck with absolutely miserable storage I/O.
Or you can N100, 8GB (replaceable and expandable RAM, 256GB NVMe (also replaceable) for $140.
Pi5 does not make any sense in this day and age, unless you specifically need GPIO for your tinkering. You can save $30 by going with the 2GB pi5 option but that seems the wrong direction to go. N100 is more than 50% better performance with similar or lower cost and better support for off the shelf ram and ssd.
I've got their first board since 2016 and it's been running cooler than a raspberry pi 4 (2019) with the same software on it.
I was sceptical at first too, but in the end the Pi 4 now feels like the Pi 3B+ felt against the Pi 4 (and that was just a 30% perf boost, this is 3x). I.e. just hopelessly slow in comparison, and the few I've got will be relegated only to the least demanding projects. The Pi 5 is now the standard Pi.
I’ve seen this happen to me, and a combination of plugging in a dummy HDMI dongle into the GPU, toggling on/off nvidia nvfbenc (hope I’m spelling this right) fixed it for me.
I got as far as "It looks like it is using software encoding and it should be doing nvenc or something, but it Works Fine for everyone else so nobody ever writes about how any of this shit actually fucking works so troubleshooting it is more effort than it is worth."
And it isn't clear to me -- at all -- how plugging in a dongle that acts like a monitor is going to help anything at all.
I already have three fucking monitors plugged in. All different shapes. A fourth one cannot help.
All that said, I don't think steam link does this automatically, but there are probably tools that have been made for switching your main display to the dongle and setting the correct resolution for it when you initiate a streaming connection. At least I know there are helper ones for Sunshine so I am assuming it is true for Steam Link as well.
Not that this would fix an encoding issue if that is your problem.
Over the net: Parsec
Altough I'd also recommend looking into Moonlight and Sunshine.