Moonlight recently went through a bit of a seachange when Nvidia announced that it would be discontinuing the server-side part of the moonlight solution, basically pulling the rug out from under them. In response, they made their own (Sunshine) which works on all platforms, not just nvidia, using the knowledge they’ve gained along the way. No longer beholden to the black box of nvidia devs yanking them around blindly. It is incredible.

Moonlight on a steam deck and Sunshine on a gaming pc works astoundingly well. I’ve been playing many games on Moonlight at Ultra settings, 720p60 (b/c why go higher). I could go down a list, but really there’s only ONE game you need to know I’ve been playing without any trouble:

Ghostrunner.

Ghostrunner is basically a sci-fi parkour game like Mirror’s Edge which much more twitch gameplay, more arcade-y/difficult. If I can play this game on Moonlight, any game okay with 720p60 can be played, truly.

I will go as far to say that if a game has cloud save, YOU SHOULD be playing the game on Moonlight while at home and then switching to locally on the steam deck while traveling/remote. I haven’t tried using Moonlight remotely and honestly I don’t care to. I’m extremely picky with input lag and the speed of light would prevent a sub-frame amount of input lag from being possible.

My network setup is CLOSE to ideal, however I’m using the steam deck wirelessly, which is the key ingredient to Moonlight being useful imo.

Gaming PC->switch->router = wired, Steam deck connected to router wirelessly on the 5GHz band, nothing fancy like the 6 people.

*Why not just use remote play?*

Remote play is fine, but it’s not fantastic. It has a few instability issues even on a network setup as streamlined as mine. If you want to check whether it would be worth it to play Witcher 3 at ultra 60fps or just keep playing it at 30fps medium/low on the deck, I’d encourage you to try it remote play and see if you care before setting up Moonlight. (Setting up moonlight isn’t that bad, but remote play is literally just one or two buttons). Also the big one is that Remote Play only works through steam so if you want to play a game on some other platform you have to add it to steam which is a bit of a pain.

tl;dr - Moonlight at home = every game you own at full settings, 4-6 hours battery life (unthrottled, could get much better I’m sure), sub-frame input lag, no HD space.