Setting up Sunshine and Moonlight for high performance game streaming on Linux
Can you run this headless, or do you need Wayland running?
You can. Look at “Games on Whales” github. I run it daily with that hosting in a server and streaming on my tv
Thank you, I will check this out!
… what exactly do you intend to stream without a display server running? Yes you can run it headless, but you still need x11 or wayland obviously.
This might be a time when an ignorant point of view helps, like mine. I don’t know anything about Wayland- Is it like Zululand but where the Way tribe lives? Anyway, my naive assumption is OP was wondering if you can run it on a server that does not have a display plugged in.
Duh, stream a b&w tty terminal in all of its glory! What is ssh?
I’m relatively new to Linux and this is deeper than a usual topic into a stack I don’t know.
I have a server, it has a graphics card, and I already have steam running with GameScope so the whole app renders into a single frame buffer.
I just don’t know how the graphics/app pipeline plumbing needs to work to be able to run that headlessly and stream it, which would be my ideal situation.
For this to work you need a display to send through the network, but that display needs not be a physical one. So depending on your definition it can be run headless. If you meant without it being plugged to a display then yes, if you meant without having graphical stack installed then no (there would be no point to streaming display without a display).
Thank you, and yes, I meant not needing to be plugged into an active monitor with mouse and keyboard running.
I think from just this discussion I’m realizing some of what I didn’t know I didn’t know/misunderstood about the whole desktop system on Linux.
Sunshine worked brilliantly under Windows 11, but unfortunately on Linux it lacks the ability to encode the video stream using my RX 7800 XT and microstutters like crazy.
Sunshine has managed to brick my displays twice on Linux. It’s wild how poor sunshine is on Linux.
Moonlight works flawlessly tho.
I guess the question is did you set up VA-API and do you have an processor with integrated graphics?
When I set my instance up, I had to do just a bit of ID’ing since my processor/MB has a iGPU at device 0 that was for debugging purposes and wasn’t going to be up to snuff for encoding.
Yes I do have VA-API and no iGPU, so there wasn’t an easy fix.
I also see the same issue on Bazzite and CachyOS, and the same issue using Apollo and Sunshine. I’ve also deeply investigated network issues as the cause but I think that was a red herring.
Windows was fine out of the box and has specific AMD gpu codexes that the Linux build doesn’t have (I assume proprietary?) so that seems the most likely cause.
Sunshine should be able to do hardware encoding for that GPU, it has support for VA-API
I don’t know if it’s the encoder or Wayland being Wayland, but there stutters on the stream (but not the host screen) using VA-API.
Using the same host/receiver on windows (but a different encoder) there’s no issue so not sure it’s related to VRR or framerate matching as many suggest.
It works brilliantly on my Linux host with a 7800 XT, I think you might have an unrelated issue.
is the output of the log (in the sunshine configurator web page) showing any codec errors? give that a read and report back to us with more info.
i had a similar problem before and it was related to permissions and how it was installed. the sunshine packages are finnicky as fuck on linux.
No output errors at all. It actually runs at high frame rates and high resolution. No matter what res or frame cap or bandwidth limit it will microstutter in predictable ways :(
I’ve tried Sunshine and Moonlight, on both Bazzite (pre-installed and configured) and CachyOS (pacman and AUR).
mine logs it as such:
Info: Found H.264 encoder: h264_vaapi [vaapi] Info: Found HEVC encoder: hevc_vaapi [vaapi]after a bunch of messages about trying some codecs and setting bitrate and color depth for the found encoders. connecting with a client should show you no errors and a message with the selected encoder. you can try cpu encoding to see if that changes anything for a clue.
if the encoders are showing up as properly detected and selected in the logs, then you might want to look into something else as encoders are probably not the cause.
I use Sunshine+moonlight to stream from my Linux desktop (7900xtx) to my Steam Deck and it works great. Even AV1 streaming works.
My 7900xt works great, could Be some other issue
Sunshine uses VA-API for AMD GPUs, works fine on my RX 6600
It works fine on my 7800XT.
They’re just confusing ‘This isn’t working for me’ with ‘This isn’t working for Linux’
Dual booting Windows and it works fine there, and there’s definitely encoders not present in Linux that are in windows.
Open to suggestions, or are you just here to have strong opinions about things?
I have both strong opinions on things and suggestions.
The Windows software stack is completely independent of the Linux software stack. This doesn’t tell you anything about the problem. Trying Windows tells you that the hardware has the capability, but you could have learned that from a spec sheet.
If you want to solve the problem on Linux, make a post with the details of the problem and what you’ve tried so far as well as any logging that you can get out of Sunshine which would show you starting Sunshine and starting a stream.
Without any other information:I read the fantastic manual.
It looks like you’re likely running into a documented problem: Mesa has disabled VA-API for legal reasons
Without vaapi support, sunshine falls to software encoding which means the encoding is running on your CPU and that is what is causing the stuttering, so to fix it you would need to install a version of mesa that’s been compiled with the correct flags (h264enc, 265enc).
The instructions for doing this depends on our distro. On Arch, amdonly-gaming-mesa-git is listed as an optional package for the AUR version of sunshine, amdonly-gaming-mesa-git is compiled with video-codes=all which will enabled the h264, h265 support.
I did exactly this but unfortunately it didn’t address the issue I was experiencing. I read the manual you linked and the support forum for Sunshine.
I posted about it in support forums and also got helpful advice about network latency, matching res and refresh rates to host, running Wayland only session, running game scope, using Apollo, etc.It unfortunately didn’t help.
I tried it on Bazzite (where it is preconfigured) and CachyOS and got the same result on both.
It suspect it’s the encoder but I think it could be a Wayland issue. I didn’t test X11 as that didn’t really suit my purposes.
I explored this issue pretty thoroughly and spent hours trying to solve it :(
I used this some time ago on a raspberry pi to steam games from my desktop to my couch and TV. It worked great. Now, I run it in my laptop and plug it to the TV from time to time. Still a great setup.
