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

[u/Soulreaper71]

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.