I’ve recently resurrected my partner’s old gaming PC by wiping the Windows install and putting Kubuntu on it. It’s a reasonably old machine at this point, but it’s still capable enough to play games like Red Dead 2 without any issues.

It’s running an AMD 8120 3.10Ghz CPU, with an Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, with 16Gb RAM.

The GPU happens to be the minimum spec for Cyberpunk, which runs pretty well on it. I have the Nvidia drivers installed and everything seems ok in that regard.

The trouble comes when I try to stream it to, well, anything other than its own screen. With both Steamlink and Sunshine/Moonlight it’s unplayable. If/when a game does finally load, it runs at a good 5fps.

I’m pretty new to Linux gaming, so don’t really know where to start, so also don’t really know what questions I need to ask in the first place.

So yeah, which are the best guides to look at to figure out how best to optimise my setup?

  • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    8 hours ago

    It might be the old motherboard and chipset. If they don’t have good speed they won’t be able to keep up with the bitrate or bandwidth necessary for streaming. Old chipsets weren’t made for it since it wasn’t a thing years ago. Just to name one component, newer PCI express busses are sometimes 10 to 100 times faster than older formats (like PCI-X). For example, PCIe 8 doubles the speed of PCIe 7 that is barely 3 years old, imagine compared to even older versions. This is necessary to keep up with internet modems and the typical speeds and ping times required for game streaming with minimum lag.

    • djdarren@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      We have had the same PC streaming to Moonlight in the past, but that was back when it was running Windows. Also, we only had a 1080 TV then. Even downscaling Moonlight to 720 didn’t really seem to make much difference.

      Not being able to stream isn’t really the end of the world, but it would be nice if I could work it out.

      • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        8 hours ago

        OK, now we know the hardware is capable. But there are still many other factors. I theorize it could be a driver. But for that it would be necessary to know distro, kernel version, hardware specs. It could be a kernel module that is not loaded on your distro version or it could be that the driver simply doesn’t exist yet. It could be a configuration problem in moonlight. Explore those venues and report back with more info.