foundation-sunshine

Foundation Sunshine turns a Windows gaming PC into a streaming host. Install it, point a Moonlight client at it (phone, tablet, TV, Steam Deck, an old laptop), and you are playing your own game library remotely at low latency. This is a fork of LizardByte's Sunshine that pushes harder on picture quality: HDR10 and HLG encoded in parallel, per-frame GPU brightness analysis feeding HDR10+ and HDR Vivid metadata, 7.1.4 surround, remote microphone passthrough, and a built-in virtual display so you can stream at the client's resolution without touching your real monitor. GPL-3.0, free, no account.

The host is Windows only and that is not a soft requirement. You need a GPU with a modern hardware encoder (NVENC, AMF, or Quick Sync), and the virtual display feature installs a driver, so budget a reboot and a Windows security prompt. Streaming from outside your own network means port forwarding or putting a mesh VPN like Tailscale in front of it. Setup is an evening, not a weekend, but it is fiddlier than upstream Sunshine because there are more knobs to get wrong.

Solo and household use is the whole point. There is no paid tier and no cloud. Against Parsec Warp at $9.99/mo or GeForce Now, you are trading a monthly bill and someone else's hardware for your own GPU and your own network. If you already own a gaming PC that sits idle while you are on the couch, the math is not close.

The catch is documentation. The main README, the docs site, and the support channels are Chinese-first, and the English translations lag the feature set. Hit an obscure HDR or virtual-display bug and you will be reading machine-translated docs to solve it. Upstream LizardByte/Sunshine is the calmer choice if you can live without the HDR pipeline.