Remote Play seems to be a constant problem for Valve to fix up on Steam / Steam Deck, as there's always something broken with it and the latest Steam Client Beta fixes it up again.
The Sunshine + Moonlight combo is technically better - the network path is better, you get granular control over the encoder and decoder, and the latency is insanely low.
However, there’s one thing Moonlight gets totally wrong and Steam Remote Play fixes automatically: frame pacing. Even if you enable vsync and frame pacing on Sunshine and Moonlight, if your host doesn’t match your client (say a 144Hz PC streaming to a 120 Hz TV, or a 59.97 NTSC TV vs a 60 Hz host and so on) the experience is terrible - camera movement becomes stuttery. The performance is good, the latency is good, yet somehow you feel like something’s wrong and movement is not smooth at all.
Remote Play will add extra latency by introducing a buffer, but it will also be silky smooth regardless of what bizarre combination of framerate and refresh rates you have. This is super relevant, because with a VRR display, Moonlight really breaks down while Remote Play handles it trivially.
I love Steam Remote Play.
The Sunshine + Moonlight combo is technically better - the network path is better, you get granular control over the encoder and decoder, and the latency is insanely low.
However, there’s one thing Moonlight gets totally wrong and Steam Remote Play fixes automatically: frame pacing. Even if you enable vsync and frame pacing on Sunshine and Moonlight, if your host doesn’t match your client (say a 144Hz PC streaming to a 120 Hz TV, or a 59.97 NTSC TV vs a 60 Hz host and so on) the experience is terrible - camera movement becomes stuttery. The performance is good, the latency is good, yet somehow you feel like something’s wrong and movement is not smooth at all.
Remote Play will add extra latency by introducing a buffer, but it will also be silky smooth regardless of what bizarre combination of framerate and refresh rates you have. This is super relevant, because with a VRR display, Moonlight really breaks down while Remote Play handles it trivially.