Is the Steam Deck performance struggling with new AAA games? Should I be concerned buying a Steam Deck now?
I’m guessing/hoping not because most game developers would optimise the games for the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which have similar performances as the Deck.
I think 30 fps (consistent) is perfectly fine, and I don’t mind medium details.
Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?
I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.
Steam Link just… Works. It’s an official Valve thing. There’s a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it’s not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I’m on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b
For me, the visual fidelity is better and I found it to be a lot more stable overall, particularly in the framerate / latency department. This was the case over the local network but became even more pronounced when I played from another city. Back when I first set it up, Steam Link didn’t have HDR Support so doing regular navigation on my desktop looked all washed out and awful.
Moonlight is the client side, it runs on the Steam Deck that is AMD based. Sunshine is what runs on the host - you need both.
MoonDeck is a Decky Loader plugin that lets you run your stream for each game by its appid, letting you keep your controller layouts in order. Normally, you’d be launching Moonlight and then the stream, which means you’d have to have your controller layout for each game associated with the Moonlight appod and then have to manually switch between them depending on what you’re playing.
It’s certainly more involved than the simplicity of running Steam Link, but for me the benefits were well worth it.