As of late 2022, NVIDIA announced that they will be discontinuing their popular GameStream technology. This move has left many users wondering what this means for their app user experience and how it affects the gaming community at large.

In a nutshell, NVIDIA's GameStream end of service announcement primarily centers around the removal of support from their official NVIDIA Games client. While this might seem like a significant change, it's unlikely that they would continue to invest maintenance resources in the host software when no official clients exist. In fact, 2024 saw another major development - GeForce Experience itself will be discontinued in favor of a new NVIDIA app, which doesn't support GameStream and installing it will remove GeForce Experience.

What Happens Next?

In the short term, nothing much changes. Moonlight will continue to be usable with host PCs running the latest version of GeForce Experience until at least mid-February 2023. This gives users some time to adjust to the change before things start wrapping up.

A New Era in Game Streaming: Sunshine to the Rescue

As part of our long-term goal of providing an excellent open-source game streaming solution, we've been working hard to improve the Sunshine project - a free and open-source host for Moonlight. With Sunshine, users can enjoy features like:

  • Support for AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs
  • Full DualShock controller emulation, including motion sensors, touchpad, and light bar control
  • AV1 encoding for higher quality than HEVC or H.264 codecs
  • Built-in support for hosting on the Internet without requiring a separate tool
  • Built-in support for IPv6 without requiring a separate tool
  • Host capture/encoding latency reporting that appears in Moonlight's on-screen performance overlay

By investing our time and effort into making Sunshine a top-tier game streaming host, we can ensure that the whims of a single company cannot unilaterally impact the game streaming community again.

What About GeForce Experience?

Past mid-February 2023, the status of hosting GeForce Experience is unclear. It's likely that GameStream functionality will be present in GeForce Experience for a little longer since major updates don't arrive very often. Even when the functionality is removed, users may still be able to use GameStream by running older versions of GeForce Experience and blocking the automatic update mechanism.

The Future of Game Streaming

While GameStream's performance and capabilities were excellent, they did limit our capabilities in some ways. With Sunshine, we can now implement features like microphone support for GeForce Now, PS4 or Xbox One controller emulation, trigger rumble support, client-side cursor rendering, and AV1 encoding support.

Conclusion

In any case, it is unlikely that we will remove support for streaming from GeForce Experience for the foreseeable future. We're committed to providing a seamless app user experience for our users, even as things change in the world of game streaming.

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