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?
I’d test if the system correctly recognises hardware encoders and decoders on your graphics card.
You can do this by running mpv media player with the following command:
If you then press I while the video is playing inside of MPV and it says “nvdec” next to “Video:” and “h264” or “h265”, it works.
If this works and you are still experiencing problems with game streaming from Sunshine, then you have misconfigured Sunshine.
If it does not say that, or it refuses to start because it can’t find NVdec, you need to install the (older) proprietary Nvidia drivers as you have an older 10 generation card, which aren’t supported by the integrated free software drivers that most distros use to talk to nvidia GPUs.
For the future, I mean this in a very kind way: Please be more specific and concise when describing your problems. From your question, I don’t know if you mean that you want to optimise your system in general, if you have trouble using it as a host for game streaming, so you run Sunshine on it and play the game on another device, or if you want to use it as a client for game streaming, so another machine is running the heavy game and you’re just streaming it to the “low-spec” machine. Reason is we’re strangers on the internet. We don’t know what’s going on with your system because we don’t have access to it. We don’t even know what your system looks like. So you need to be very detailed and very precise with what you want to accomplish and what problems you currently have.
Edit: typo.