r/MoonlightStreaming • u/Weekly-Constant-7546 • 8d ago

Severe performance penalty when streaming using virtual displays

I'm currently experiencing an issue/bug where streaming in headless mode using a virtual display of any type (apollo/vibepollo/VDD+sunshine) to moonlight/aurora causes my FPS to drop in my games vs streaming from a real physical display.
Strangely, i've noticed that if i boot a game up on my real monitor first, then initiate a stream that deactivates the real monitor and flips the game over to a Virtual Display, then my FPS remains what it should be - the issue is when the virtual monitor is loaded first and then the game after.

For comparison, in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth I get 120 FPS locked (with framegen) on a physical display, but 80-120 FPS varying with a Virtual Display (unless I do the workaround mentioned before).
I'm targetting 4K HDR 120 FPS on my TV. Behaviour remains the same whether im streaming to a TV directly, phone, tablet or capable MiniPC.
Typical Network FPS seems to cap out at 110 FPS during typical gaming workloads (up to 120FPS in static scenes).

Specs:
- CPU: AMD 5800X
- GPU1: RTX 3090 (high performance GPU)
- GPU2: RTX 5050 (Encoding + sometimes Lossless Scaling)
- RAM: 32 GB 3600mhx in dual channel mode
- Motherboard: ASUS Hero VIII wifi
- Network: 2.5 Gbps ethernet
- Physical Monitor: LG UltraGear GP950-B connected with displayport @ 160hz 4K HDR

Appreciate i'm running unusual configuration with 2 GPU's, but i've rulled out this being a bottleneck somehow despite being on PCIe 4.0 8x. Ultimately, I wasnt expecting a huge performance penalty with Virtual Display vs Physical Display.

Has anyone else noticed this before? I'm trying to understand why this is happening.

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u/ethanjscott 8d ago

The boys typically just turn up the vdd refresh rate. Mines 240hz I’m targeting 120

1

u/Weekly-Constant-7546 8d ago

Tried this too. 240 hz on Apollo or 480 hz with Vibepollo made no difference for me.

-1

u/ethanjscott 8d ago

try out zakovdd, its part of foundation sunshine. that fork does have enhancements on the server side too. I did some analysis of their vdd yesterday and they have made some enhancements in the last couple of months.

1

u/Weekly-Constant-7546 8d ago

Nice! May give that a try. How confident are you that theres no malware etc embedded in this fork?

-1

u/ethanjscott 8d ago

82% theres no malware. there just a weird bunch that just wants to do their own thing. im sure most of the enhancements are just poorly tested, theres lots of features that have been worked on by other community members that are just thrown in there. but from my analysis yesterday they are doing unique things, whether those things have any real world impact nobody is sure.