If your gaming PC sits in one room but you’d rather play on the couch, in bed, or on a phone in the kitchen, you don’t need a cloud subscription. Sunshine and Moonlight let you run the games on your own hardware and stream the video anywhere you have a client. As of July 2026, Sunshine’s latest release is v2026.704.34109 (LizardByte Sunshine changelog), and the project ships regular security fixes — the v2026.516.143833 build from 16 May 2026 was flagged as carrying critical security updates (Sunshine releases), so staying current matters more than usual. Moonlight’s open-source client and its supported platforms are documented on the official Moonlight project site.
Here’s the mental model before we touch any settings: Sunshine is the host that runs on your Windows, macOS, or Linux gaming machine and captures its screen, audio, and gamepad input. Moonlight is the client that you install on the device you actually hold — a phone, a TV box, a Steam Deck, a MacBook, even a webOS TV. Together they form an open-source alternative to NVIDIA’s old GameStream. That matters right now because NVIDIA is winding down the SHIELD streaming features inside GeForce Experience, which is exactly the niche Sunshine was built to fill.
The pairing is what makes it feel like magic: you install Sunshine once on the rig, install Moonlight on whatever you want to play on, scan a PIN, and the client discovers the host on your network. From there you’re streaming your full desktop or a specific game at up to 4K with HDR and 120 FPS on capable clients.
What you actually get out of it depends on where you play. On a phone, it’s your entire Steam library in your pocket on a train. On a TV, it’s your desktop GPU rendering a game your living-room box could never run. On a Steam Deck or another handheld, it’s a lightweight device punching far above its weight because the heavy lifting happens back home. None of these require you to buy a second copy of a game or pay a monthly streaming fee — the rig you already own does the work.
Install Sunshine on the host PC
One quiet gotcha: Sunshine needs to grab your GPU for low-latency capture. On Windows that usually “just works” with an NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel GPU. On Linux you may need to grant it access to your display session, and on a headless box you’ll want a virtual display driver so there’s something to capture when nobody’s at the monitor. None of that is hard, but it’s the difference between “it streams” and “it streams at 120 FPS.”
Pair Moonlight and the host
Install Moonlight on the client device. The project maintains official clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS/iPadOS, Apple TV, and ChromeOS, plus community ports for the Steam Deck (via moonlight-qt), Xbox, PS Vita, Nintendo Switch, Wii U, and LG webOS TVs. Open Moonlight, and it auto-discovers Sunshine hosts on the same network. Select your PC, enter the short PIN shown in the Sunshine web UI, and the pairing is saved.
From that point, Moonlight shows the apps Sunshine exposes — by default your whole desktop plus anything Sunshine detected as a game. Tap the desktop tile and you’re looking at your rig’s screen live; tap a game and Sunshine launches it and streams only that window. For most people the desktop tile is the simplest starting point, because it means any launcher (Steam, Epic, GOG, emulators) is fair game.
Tune for a clean picture
Moonlight’s settings are where the experience is won or lost. Match the resolution and refresh rate to the client’s screen, not the host’s. If you’re streaming to a 1080p phone, requesting 4K just wastes bandwidth and adds latency. Set the bitrate to roughly 20–40 Mbps for 1080p and 80–100+ Mbps for 4K HDR over wired or strong Wi-Fi; too low and you’ll see compression artifacts in fast motion, too high and you’ll stall on a weak link.
For input, Moonlight forwards gamepads, mouse, and keyboard. Pair a Bluetooth controller to the client device and it appears as a local gamepad on the host. If you disable V-Sync in the Moonlight PC client you can shave a little latency at the cost of occasional tearing — worth it for competitive play, less so for a relaxed RPG on the TV.
Reach it outside the house
Streaming across the internet is where Sunshine’s “self-hosted cloud” promise pays off, but you should not just open the Sunshine port to the world. The safe routes are a mesh VPN like Tailscale or ZeroTier, or IPv6, both of which Moonlight documents as supported. A mesh VPN puts your client and host on the same virtual network without exposing ports to the public internet — and given the 2026 security advisories, that’s the responsible way to do it. Many residential ISPs also allow simple port forwarding if you’d rather go that route, but combine it with a strong Sunshine UI password and keep the software updated.
What you need before you start
The host should be a real gaming or workstation PC — the encoding Sunshine does is lighter than running the game itself, but a weak machine will both play and stream poorly. A wired Ethernet connection on the host is the single biggest latency win; Wi-Fi works, but a congested 2.4 GHz network will introduce stutter that no setting can fully hide. On the client side, any device Moonlight supports will do, though 4K HDR naturally wants a screen and decoder that can show it.
If you plan to stream outside your home, sort out the mesh VPN (Tailscale is the easiest to set up) on both ends before you’re standing at a hotel desk wondering why nothing shows up. Moonlight only finds the host when the two devices can actually reach each other on the same logical network.
Fixing the usual hiccups
Most first-run problems are boring and quick to solve. Black screen on connect usually means Sunshine can’t capture the display — on Windows, check that a monitor or virtual display is active; on Linux, confirm Sunshine has access to your session. Controller not detected means the gamepad is paired to the host, not the client — pair it to the device in your hands and Moonlight bridges it across. Stuttering or artifacting is almost always bitrate or Wi-Fi; drop the resolution or bitrate a notch and move the client closer to the router. Audio on the wrong device is fixed in the Sunshine audio settings, where you pick which output gets captured.
None of these require reinstalling anything. The project’s own FAQ (docs.lizardbyte.dev) covers each in more detail, and the community Discord is unusually helpful for device-specific quirks like a particular Android build or a handheld’s mapping.
A quick note on performance expectations
It’s worth setting realistic expectations so the first session isn’t a disappointment. Local-network streaming on wired Ethernet feels effectively native — most players stop noticing they’re streaming within minutes. Wi-Fi is good but variable; a strong 5 GHz signal is fine for 1080p, while 4K HDR really wants a wire or a very clean wireless link. Over the internet, your upload speed at home is the ceiling: a 40 Mbps upstream caps what you can push, so remotely you may drop to 1080p even if the client screen is 4K. That’s normal, not a misconfiguration — you’re limited by the pipe leaving your house, not by Sunshine.
Why this beats the alternatives
NVIDIA’s GameStream is being retired inside GeForce Experience, so Moonlight’s original host is going away. Sunshine is open source under an active community, runs on hardware NVIDIA never blessed, and gives you a private server with no per-hour fee and no queue. Competitors like Parsec exist, but they’re a company with paid tiers; Sunshine plus Moonlight is free and GPLv3, and you own the whole pipeline.
The trade-off is honest: you’re responsible for your own host, your own network, and your own updates. But for anyone with a decent gaming PC and a phone or TV they’d like to play it on, that’s a small price for a streaming setup that doesn’t answer to a subscription.
Sources: LizardByte Sunshine changelog and documentation (latest v2026.704.34109; v2026.516.143833, 16 May 2026, marked with critical security updates); Moonlight project site and setup guide (open-source GameStream client, up to 4K HDR / 120 FPS, NVIDIA GeForce Experience SHIELD streaming being discontinued).
