Sunshine
FreeRuns on your gaming PC and streams to Moonlight
The host-side service for game streaming, paired with the Moonlight client. It encodes your computer's video and audio, streams them out and accepts controller, mouse and keyboard input in return. Hardware encoding works on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel graphics, replacing NVIDIA's discontinued GameStream.
Why we picked it
This is the other half of Moonlight. Moonlight is the client you install on a TV, tablet or laptop to receive the picture — and something has to send it. That is Sunshine's job.
The background: Moonlight originally paired with NVIDIA's GameStream, which NVIDIA discontinued in 2023. The community's answer was Sunshine, an open-source host-side replacement. 40,160 stars, GPL-3.0.
The result is better than what it replaced:
- Graphics-agnostic. GameStream supported only certain NVIDIA cards; Sunshine handles hardware encoding on NVIDIA (NVENC), AMD (AMF) and Intel (QuickSync), so integrated graphics work too.
- Platform-agnostic. Windows, Linux and macOS can all be the host, where GameStream was Windows only.
- More configurable. A web interface exposes resolution, frame rate, bitrate, encoder and HDR settings, plus custom launch entries — so beyond games you can configure it to start a specific program on connection, or simply stream the whole desktop.
Pairing is straightforward: install it, open its web interface on port 47990, set a username and password, then enter the host IP in Moonlight and exchange a pairing code once.
To be clear about:
- It is only the host side. You still install Moonlight on the receiving device, and the two work together. This confuses nearly everyone the first time.
- The network determines the experience. Wired gigabit is best, 5GHz Wi-Fi is workable, and 2.4GHz is not worth attempting. Streaming is more sensitive to jitter than to raw bandwidth, so an unstable home network produces stutter and tearing.
- Firewall ports must be allowed. The Windows installer usually prompts; the documentation lists the ports for manual configuration.
- Streaming over the internet takes extra work. It defaults to local network use, and pairing it with a mesh tool like Tailscale is the easiest way to reach home from elsewhere — no port forwarding and considerably safer.
- Encoding costs host performance. It consumes some GPU capacity, so on older cards, streaming at high resolution and frame rate reduces the game's own frame rate.
Who it suits: anyone with a capable desktop who wants to play on a living room TV or tablet, or to run heavy software on the desktop while working from a thin laptop.