I’ve recently resurrected my partner’s old gaming PC by wiping the Windows install and putting Kubuntu on it. It’s a reasonably old machine at this point, but it’s still capable enough to play games like Red Dead 2 without any issues.
It’s running an AMD 8120 3.10Ghz CPU, with an Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, with 16Gb RAM.
The GPU happens to be the minimum spec for Cyberpunk, which runs pretty well on it. I have the Nvidia drivers installed and everything seems ok in that regard.
The trouble comes when I try to stream it to, well, anything other than its own screen. With both Steamlink and Sunshine/Moonlight it’s unplayable. If/when a game does finally load, it runs at a good 5fps.
I’m pretty new to Linux gaming, so don’t really know where to start, so also don’t really know what questions I need to ask in the first place.
So yeah, which are the best guides to look at to figure out how best to optimise my setup?
Heh, TFW someone describes “resurrecting” a “low-spec” machine, and others talk about how old and out of date it is, and it’s roughly equivalent to your main gaming PC.
Nice. Mine is a bit newer, but it wasn’t long ago that I rocked a Phenom CPU with a 700 series GPU, which I later upgraded to a 900 series.
I’m now on something a bit newer with an AMD Ryzen 5600 and 6650XT, but that rig isn’t all that different from what I ran before this one.
Sorry, I was trying to avoid replies from the kind of person who’d say “your shit’s too old! Get a new one!” when the point of what I’m doing is giving new life to a forgotten computer.
As I said, it still plays RDR2 beautifully, so for that reason alone I’m keen to get it running as well as I can, because I love getting lost in that wilderness.
Nah, you’re cool. I know my system’s old, but as you say there’s still plenty of life in it, so I’ll keep it for now. Especially since I stick entirely to indie games these days.
But actually, I’m keeping an eye on auctions for something just a few years newer. Games that require AVX2 extensions are finally starting to come out, and my CPU doesn’t support them. Even with indie games, most of them use third-party engines, so it might not be too much longer before it’s an issue even for me.
Two of my family members are still rocking machines of this vintage. Get a Vishera-based (8300 series) FX CPU if you can find it cheap, so you at least have x86-64-v2 instruction set. It helps. You probably have (Realtek?) gigabit networking onboard, but an Intel gigabit card will improve networking performance.
When streaming, you’re running the game and encoding video at the same time. This will make the PC double as a space heater, which might be OK if you’re in the northern hemisphere and approaching winter! 😉
It might be the old motherboard and chipset. If they don’t have good speed they won’t be able to keep up with the bitrate or bandwidth necessary for streaming. Old chipsets weren’t made for it since it wasn’t a thing years ago. Just to name one component, newer PCI express busses are sometimes 10 to 100 times faster than older formats (like PCI-X). For example, PCIe 8 doubles the speed of PCIe 7 that is barely 3 years old, imagine compared to even older versions. This is necessary to keep up with internet modems and the typical speeds and ping times required for game streaming with minimum lag.
We have had the same PC streaming to Moonlight in the past, but that was back when it was running Windows. Also, we only had a 1080 TV then. Even downscaling Moonlight to 720 didn’t really seem to make much difference.
Not being able to stream isn’t really the end of the world, but it would be nice if I could work it out.
OK, now we know the hardware is capable. But there are still many other factors. I theorize it could be a driver. But for that it would be necessary to know distro, kernel version, hardware specs. It could be a kernel module that is not loaded on your distro version or it could be that the driver simply doesn’t exist yet. It could be a configuration problem in moonlight. Explore those venues and report back with more info.
What resolution are you streaming to now? Make sure the game is being streamed at 1080p or 720p, and not aiming for the native resolution of your target device. Because if it’s trying to stream at 4k for example it’ll fail miserably.
16 GB RAM is sufficient, though with an FX 8120, Kubuntu might be a bit steep… if you want an Ubuntu, I would strongly suggest Lubuntu for the lightweightness, unless you absolutely need Wayland.
As for the Moonlight problem, make sure you have the nvidia drivers installed, and you also use nvenc to encode in h264 or h265.
Last I saw kde was less resource intensive? Been a bit tho
1.6 GB RAM KDE vs 500 MB RAM LXqt last I checked
To help narrow it down I’d try streaming a low-end game that runs very well locally and doesn’t tax the system. If this doesn’t stream well either that would suggest that it’s something specific to the streaming setup, perhaps a networking issue.
I’d test if the system correctly recognises hardware encoders and decoders on your graphics card.
You can do this by running mpv media player with the following command:mpv --hwdec=nvdec your_yideo_name.mp4If you then press I while the video is playing inside of MPV and it says “nvdec” next to “Video:” and “h264” or “h265”, it works.
If this works and you are still experiencing problems with game streaming from Sunshine, then you have misconfigured Sunshine.
If it does not say that, or it refuses to start because it can’t find NVdec, you need to install the (older) proprietary Nvidia drivers as you have an older 10 generation card, which aren’t supported by the integrated free software drivers that most distros use to talk to nvidia GPUs.
For the future, I mean this in a very kind way: Please be more specific and concise when describing your problems. From your question, I don’t know if you mean that you want to optimise your system in general, if you have trouble using it as a host for game streaming, so you run Sunshine on it and play the game on another device, or if you want to use it as a client for game streaming, so another machine is running the heavy game and you’re just streaming it to the “low-spec” machine. Reason is we’re strangers on the internet. We don’t know what’s going on with your system because we don’t have access to it. We don’t even know what your system looks like. So you need to be very detailed and very precise with what you want to accomplish and what problems you currently have.
Edit: typo.
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