Open-source Shadow PC alternatives

Sunshine is a streaming host for PC games that you run on your own machine, built to work with Moonlight clients. It provides low-latency, cloud-gaming-style streaming from your own computer, with hardware encoding on AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs and a software encoding fallback. It is written in C++, released under the GPL-3.0 license and developed by LizardByte.

You connect from any Moonlight client on a range of devices. A web interface lets you configure the host and pair clients from a browser, whether from the local server or from a mobile device. The documentation includes a feature compatibility table showing which gamepad types can be emulated on FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows, including generic, DualShock 4, DualSense, Switch Pro and several Xbox controllers.

Packaging topics reference Docker, winget, Homebrew, Flathub and pacman. Full documentation is hosted on Read the Docs for stable and beta releases. Sunshine suits gamers who want to play PC games on other screens at home or remotely, and users who prefer an open-source host over a proprietary streaming service.

Moonlight PC is an open-source desktop client for NVIDIA GameStream and Sunshine. It receives a stream of a remote computer's screen and audio, so games and desktop apps running on a host PC can be played from another device. Mobile versions exist for Android and iOS, and this repository is the Qt-based PC client.

The client uses hardware-accelerated video decoding on Windows, Mac and Linux and supports H.264, HEVC and AV1 codecs, where AV1 needs Sunshine and a capable host GPU. It also handles HDR streaming, 7.1 surround sound, gamepads with force feedback and motion controls for up to 16 players, and either pointer capture for games or direct mouse control for remote desktop use.

Builds are published for Windows, macOS, Steam Link, Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, and several ARM and other Debian-based targets. Moonlight is licensed under GPL-3.0, with development discussion on Discord and translations handled on Weblate.

This entry covers foundation-sunshine from AlkaidLab, an enhanced fork of LizardByte's Sunshine. It is a self-hosted game streaming host that works with Moonlight clients, and it concentrates on the experience of streaming from a Windows PC.

Its additions include end-to-end HDR with dual HDR10 (PQ) and HLG encoding, per-frame brightness analysis and dynamic metadata, a deeply integrated virtual display driver with several screen modes, audio improvements such as 7.1.4 surround, a remote microphone and loss recovery, encoder optimizations for NVENC and AMF, optional NVIDIA RTX HDR and DLSS-based image enhancement, folder sharing with paired devices, gamepad and virtual DualSense support, and USB forwarding for paired clients.

A control panel built with Tauri, Vue and Vite offers dark mode, QR pairing and real-time monitoring. Setup is to install the Windows package, open the web UI on localhost, add apps and pair a Moonlight client with a PIN. The project is written in C++, licensed under GPL-3.0, and documented mainly in Chinese.