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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • For me, the visual fidelity is better and I found it to be a lot more stable overall, particularly in the framerate / latency department. This was the case over the local network but became even more pronounced when I played from another city. Back when I first set it up, Steam Link didn’t have HDR Support so doing regular navigation on my desktop looked all washed out and awful.

    I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out.

    Moonlight is the client side, it runs on the Steam Deck that is AMD based. Sunshine is what runs on the host - you need both.

    MoonDeck is a Decky Loader plugin that lets you run your stream for each game by its appid, letting you keep your controller layouts in order. Normally, you’d be launching Moonlight and then the stream, which means you’d have to have your controller layout for each game associated with the Moonlight appod and then have to manually switch between them depending on what you’re playing.

    It’s certainly more involved than the simplicity of running Steam Link, but for me the benefits were well worth it.



  • Is the Deck going to be your first / primary gaming device?

    I got my Deck primarily for indie games, 10-30 year old games, or other generally “light” / casual games to play on the go or while watching a show with my partner.

    For more demanding games, I’ll run them on my gaming PC and stream to my Deck via Sunshine / Moonlight / Moondeck. This has the added benefit of very low power consumption, meaning that instead of a ~2 hour battery life I get 6 or more.

    The added benefit here is that a lot of games seem to be shipping increasingly unoptimized. Things that might have finnicky performance on my 3840 x 1600 monitor run silky smooth when I squish them down to 1920 x 1080 to stream to the Deck, usually with maxed out settings.

    In the context of how I’m using it, Steam Deck is probably never going to be obsolete.

    If you’re considering it as your primary device and primarily want to play modern AAA games, you should probably be spending at least 2-3x as much on a laptop or desktop. For that use case, Steam Deck is more appropriate as a companion device.