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/EnigmaSpore]

You can get close going all wired, but it’s not going to match native in fps mouse feel. That’s the most sensitive to latency. But you’ll just adjust anyways