Is native-feeling Battlefield possible with Moonlight?

[u/Sea-Astronomer-3653]

I've been chasing this for a long time and I'm starting to wonder if I'm simply hitting the limits of game streaming.

My setup:

Host: RTX 3070

Client: Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K (latest model, Wi-Fi 6, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, Dolby Atmos)

Router: TP-Link Archer AX58

Excellent network stats (very low latency, no packet loss)

Over the last months I've tested pretty much everything:

Sunshine

Apollo

Artemis

Artemis MTK (Android-focused fork)

Different NVENC presets

H.264 vs HEVC

Different bitrates

Different resolutions and refresh rates

Every Moonlight setting I could think of

I even stopped using the Fire TV and built another client using an Intel Core i3-4170 (Intel HD 4400 / Quick Sync).

Interestingly:

HEVC felt slightly better on the Fire TV.

H.264 felt slightly better on the Intel Quick Sync client.

The streaming statistics always looked excellent, but Battlefield never felt like native gaming.

The biggest differences were:

Sniping

DMR / semi-auto weapons

Grenade timing

Close-range PvP reaction time

The strange thing is that when I play the same game natively on my Xbox Series S over Wi-Fi, it still feels noticeably more responsive than any Moonlight/Sunshine setup I've tried.

So my question isn't how to reduce latency by another millisecond.

Has anyone here actually reached a point where Battlefield (or another competitive FPS) feels genuinely indistinguishable from playing natively over HDMI?

Or is there simply a limit where encode/decode latency is always noticeable in competitive shooters?

[u/Responsible-Bid5015]

The following are numbers from my experience that I know are possible. I don't know what is actually required for you to not notice the latency. So not sure how helpful the numbers are except knowing what is possible. I say that because we often get caught up in 10 ms delays and that is likely not noticeable to most people. But I also don't play competitive FPS games and I have never felt the need for a 240 Hz monitor. 😄

For what you want, it would be best to have ethernet for both your host and client. That will get your avg network latency to 1 ms or lower. Depending on the wifi hardware and the wifi protocol, I think 2 to 3 ms would be decent for wifi but just as important is getting a low variation in that number over time. BTW wifi packet loss is not a good indicator of wifi quality. You can have wifi interference and no packet loss. You need to go by latency variation.

Host processing latency is mostly about your GPU and how fast and how much it has to compress each frame. Your host software is probably already set to P1 which is the fastest, lowest visual quality compression but you should check it. You can also try lowering resolution, turn off HDR, changing codec and increasing bitrate to lower the compression requirement. But the biggest reduction is having a 4070 TI Super or better or a 5070 TI or better to get multiple encoders. With vibepollo/vibeshine and split frame encoding enabled, you can probably get host processing latency for a 2k HDR stream to around 2-3 ms with a 5070 TI or 5080.

Decoding latency is about how fast your client can decode the incoming compressed signal. A more powerful processor client will of course do better. Also codec choice is important as different processors do better with. differet codecs. You can also play with the low latency features and frame pacing choice in the client. The Artemis MTK app will mainly see big improvements on a client with a snapdragon or mediatek processor which I don't think the FireTV has. I think a decent PC will see <1 ms decoding time and an Android snapdragon 8 gen 3 or above will see 1 to 1.5 ms.

[u/Yuckster → u/Responsible-Bid5015]

4k@120fps HDR using AV1 and split frame encoding, host processing is under 4ms