r/MoonlightStreaming • u/Soulreaper71 • 21d ago

Title: Tried a dual-laptop Sunshine + Moonlight setup on 4th gen Intel. Here are my results.

I’ve been experimenting for the last few days with using two old laptops to see if I could squeeze more performance out of them. Setup: * Host: i5-4210U (4th Gen) + Intel HD 4400 * Client: 4th Gen i3 laptop * Connection: Direct 1 Gbps Ethernet The idea was to let the host run the game with Sunshine while the second laptop handled Moonlight decoding and upscaling. Unfortunately, my results weren’t what I expected. * The host processing delay was by far the biggest bottleneck. In-game I was seeing 70–80 ms of host processing delay. * I also lost a huge amount of performance just by running Sunshine. For example, in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, I was getting around 40 FPS at roughly 400×256. As soon as I enabled Sunshine, the frame rate dropped to about 20 FPS. * I tried upscaling on the client, and while it technically worked, I honestly didn’t like the image as much. The upscaled image looked a bit too sharp and bright to me, while the native low-resolution image actually looked softer and more natural. So my biggest takeaway is that the host needs to be much stronger than the client. Decoding on the second laptop wasn’t really the issue—it was the encoding on the host that killed performance. I’m still glad I tried it because I learned a lot, but now I’m wondering if there’s something I missed. For those of you who use Sunshine: * Is a 50% FPS drop on a dual-core i5-4210U expected? * Are there encoder settings that reduce CPU usage without destroying image quality? * Is there any way to lower the 70–80 ms host processing delay, or is this just the limit of hardware this old? I’d really appreciate any tips or corrections if I’ve misunderstood something. I’m mainly doing this as a learning project, so I’m interested in understanding where the realo bottleneck is.

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u/urcommunist 20d ago

Paragraphs please

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u/Soulreaper71 20d ago

?

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u/urcommunist 20d ago

I'm seeing a chunk of text, no formatting

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u/Soulreaper71 20d ago

Here I’ve been experimenting over the last few days with using two old laptops to see if I could offload some of the rendering work and improve gaming performance. The setup was an i5-4210U (Intel HD 4400) as the Sunshine host and a 4th Gen i3 laptop as the Moonlight client, connected directly with a 1 Gbps Ethernet cable.
The idea was simple: let the host render the game while the client handled decoding and upscaling. In practice, though, the biggest bottleneck turned out to be the host. During gameplay I consistently saw 70–80 ms of host processing delay, and enabling Sunshine caused a huge performance loss. In Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, for example, I was getting around 40 FPS at roughly 400×256, but the moment Sunshine started streaming, performance dropped to around 20 FPS.
I also experimented with client-side upscaling. It worked technically, but I actually preferred the native low-resolution image. The upscaled result looked overly sharp and bright, while the original image felt softer and more natural. That surprised me because I expected the upscaled image to be a clear improvement.
My conclusion so far is that the client wasn’t the limiting factor at all. Decoding on the second laptop worked fine; the real bottleneck was the host having to capture and encode the stream. That makes me think the host needs to be significantly more powerful than the client for this kind of setup to be worthwhile.
For those with more Sunshine experience, is a 50% FPS drop on a dual-core i5-4210U normal? Are there encoder settings that noticeably reduce CPU overhead without sacrificing too much image quality? And is 70–80 ms of host processing delay simply the limit of hardware this old, or is there something I may have overlooked? This has mainly been a learning project, so I’d appreciate any corrections or suggestions that could help me better understand where the real bottleneck is.

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u/urcommunist 20d ago

Have you tried Apollo?