What is Foundation Sunshine used for?

Foundation Sunshine is an enhanced fork of the Sunshine game streaming host for Moonlight, adding HDR, virtual displays, richer audio and a modern control panel for Windows hosts. It is a good fit for streaming PC games to Moonlight clients, HDR game streaming at home and remote play with virtual displays.

Is Foundation Sunshine open source?

Yes. Foundation Sunshine is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at AlkaidLab/foundation-sunshine and is written mainly in C++.

Is Foundation Sunshine free?

Yes. Foundation Sunshine is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Foundation Sunshine?

Yes. Foundation Sunshine can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Foundation Sunshine an alternative to?

Foundation Sunshine is an open-source alternative to GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna, Shadow PC and Boosteroid. Other open-source alternatives to GeForce NOW include Sunshine and Moonlight.

Is Foundation Sunshine actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Foundation Sunshine was on 1 October 2026. The project has 7k stars on GitHub.

Foundation Sunshine: open-source alternative to GeForce NOW

About Foundation Sunshine

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.

Key features

HDR10 and HLG streaming with dynamic metadata
Integrated virtual display driver
7.1.4 surround sound and remote microphone
NVENC and AMF encoder optimizations
Optional NVIDIA RTX HDR and DLSS enhancement
Tauri and Vue control panel with QR pairing
Gamepad, DualSense and USB forwarding

Good fit for

→Streaming PC games to Moonlight clients
→HDR game streaming at home
→Remote play with virtual displays

Built with: C++
Tags: game-streaming; moonlight; sunshine; hdr; virtual-display; self-hosted; remote-play; windows; cpp

Foundation Sunshine: questions and answers

What is Foundation Sunshine used for?: Foundation Sunshine is an enhanced fork of the Sunshine game streaming host for Moonlight, adding HDR, virtual displays, richer audio and a modern control panel for Windows hosts. It is a good fit for streaming PC games to Moonlight clients, HDR game streaming at home and remote play with virtual displays.
Is Foundation Sunshine open source?: Yes. Foundation Sunshine is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at AlkaidLab/foundation-sunshine and is written mainly in C++.
Is Foundation Sunshine free?: Yes. Foundation Sunshine is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Foundation Sunshine?: Yes. Foundation Sunshine can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Foundation Sunshine an alternative to?: Foundation Sunshine is an open-source alternative to GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna, Shadow PC and Boosteroid. Other open-source alternatives to GeForce NOW include Sunshine and Moonlight.
Is Foundation Sunshine actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Foundation Sunshine was on 1 October 2026. The project has 7k stars on GitHub.