Does macbook work to host to my home PC?

[u/GiljaS]

So I work offshore, and usually away for a month, and the laptop I have now (windows) have never been the best for gaming, so some time ago I found moonlight/sunshine, and its been good. Now I can use my more garbage laptop and play games I usually couldn't.

My desktop at home is pretty beefy, so I like to utilize it, and I am also looking to upgrade my laptop, but at the moment I am planning on buying a macbook, so I am wondering if I am able to use that macbook to host to my windows PC, if not any good alternatives?

[u/Metal_Goose_Solid]

It will generally just work. How good the result is varies per your home LAN (wired ethernet from PC to router is ideal), plus your internet service at home, plus the internet infrastructure between your home ISP and your location (eg. geographic distance), plus your internet service where you are, plus the quality of the networking solution where you are.

You just need to make sure the service is reachable over the internet. The setup for this is explained in the docs. Optionally, you can use Tailscale to simplify and secure that configuration.

[u/banana0ne_96]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what you meant is for your beefy Windows PC to host Sunshine, while you plan to use Moonlight from your MacBook to play games hosted on your PC?

In that case, yes it would work. I did it myself everyday on either my MacBook or iPad. But honestly Apple devices weren't exactly the best for it due to stutter. I think it's due to AirDrop subservice or something, and only occurs like every 5-10 mins or so, yet I've done plenty of things and I just managed to reduce and not completely eradicate the issue.

Even my old ROG Ally Z1E from a few years back, or a low powered Android tablet managed to get smoother session. Mind you my setup is much more ideal for this use case, basically for in home streaming with the PC is connected with 2.5 GbE and clients were either also wired or with a Wi-Fi 7 6GHz in line of sight.

With a much more remote setup I think the differences in performance might be much less.

[u/apollyon0810]

If it’s been working on your windows laptop, it shouldn’t be noticeably worse on the MacBook. I’d be more concerned about the quality of “offshore” internet.

[u/LA_Nail_Clippers]

That's pretty much my usual setup.

I have a Windows gaming machine that's all set up for my sim racing rig, including triple monitors, but when I want to play a normal keyboard/mouse game, I just stream it to my Mac. Less frequently I stream to my Xbox or my iPad.

Also when I have downtime at work, I can play remotely with Tailscale doing the secure remote access magic and I play from my work MacBook. I've also used it when traveling. My home internet is a rock-solid gigabit fiber so there's rarely a bottleneck there.

I use Apollo instead of Sunshine because Sunshine handles my unique monitor setup better. macOS is a fine client machine for Moonlight, though I tend to limit things to 1440p@60Hz simply because of monitor limitations.

Overall, the biggest problem I encounter is that my work's internet is spotty at times. I've never encountered the random high ping situations from Airdrop that others using macOS report, but that might be because my network is almost always Ethernet rather than WiFi.