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Frequently Asked Questions
Moonlight is an unofficial third-party open-source client for the NVIDIA SHIELD streaming software that comes included with GeForce Experience. GeForce Experience uses the NVENC hardware on NVIDIA GPUs and custom tuned software to provide low-latency high-quality PC streaming.
Per NVIDIA's GameStream system requirements, your host needs:
- Windows 7 or later
- A 600-series NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPU or later (GT series GPUs are not supported)
- NVIDIA GeForce Experience
We have official clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi 4, Steam Link hardware, Android, Amazon Fire tablets and TVs, iOS, Apple TV, and ChromeOS devices.
The community has created unofficial ports for PS Vita and many embedded Linux devices.
Yes, for many ISPs, it's as simple as installing the Moonlight Internet Hosting Tool on your PC.
If your ISP doesn't provide dedicated public IP addresses, you can still stream using ZeroTier but the setup is slightly more complicated.
When you are streaming outside your home, we recommend that you choose a bitrate in Moonlight that is at least 1 Mbps lower than your Internet connection's upload speed. This will leave room for other upload traffic from your network to avoid disturbing your Moonlight streaming performance.
If you're connected to the same network as your host, it is usually possible to wake your PC with Moonlight. If it's not working, check your NIC driver and BIOS settings to ensure Wake-on-LAN is enabled.
If you're streaming from outside your home network, it is not always possible to wake your PC. Certain routers may support it, but many don't. We recommend that you leave your computer awake if you want to stream outside your home.
Yes, many Moonlight users use it as a high performance remote desktop client.
You can add an option to stream your full desktop using these steps.
If you're using the PC client, you can also enable remote desktop mouse mode in the Moonlight settings for a seamless mouse experience when using other apps along with Moonlight.
NVIDIA GameStream uses a secure pairing process to establish trust between clients and hosts. Each Moonlight client generates a unique key which is exchanged directly with the host PC during the pairing process. This process authorizes the Moonlight client to launch games, view installed apps, etc.
Moonlight client keys are generated and stored locally on each client. We never receive your unique client keys, so there is no online account system that could possibly be compromised to gain access to your PC.
Keyboard, mouse, and gamepad data is sent back to the host PC over an encrypted connection to prevent the possibility of this data being intercepted when travelling over an insecure network.
For even more security, you can use Moonlight over a VPN connection like ZeroTier which encrypts all traffic.
Our Discord server is the best place to find help from Moonlight developers and the community.
You can suggest improvements here. Please upvote suggestions to show your support. Only comment if you have something to add to the conversation.
Be aware that not all suggestions can be implemented, since they may require host-side changes that can only be done by NVIDIA.
The Moonlight source code is on our GitHub page.
We welcome pull requests. If you'd like to port Moonlight to a new platform, please join our Discord server. We would be happy to share our knowledge with you to help you bring Moonlight to a new platform.
GeForce Experience only officially supports 720p, 1080p, and 4K streaming resolutions. Moonlight allows users to pick resolutions to stream that aren't on that officially supported list, but these will cause GeForce Experience to set the host PC resolution to 720p when streaming starts.
This is usually not a problem, since you can configure your resolution in game to whatever you want and that will kick in when the game launches. If changing resolution in game isn't working, make sure your game is configured to use full-screen exclusive mode instead of borderless windowed mode.
You can also stream your full desktop which will not adjust your host PC resolution at all.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience only reports games that NVIDIA has manually validated to work correctly with GameStream, even if they otherwise appear in GeForce Experience's game list.
You can add any game manually using these steps.
To comply with Apple App Store Review Guideline 4.2.7d, we cannot show the Steam app out of the box, because it features a third-party store for purchasing games.
You can manually add Steam if you would like using these steps.
To comply with Apple App Store Review Guideline 4.2.7a, we cannot allow computers to be added that aren't connected to your local network. You must add them while connected to the same network.
Android 8.0 is the first version of Android that contains support for mouse pointer capture. Without this, mouse support is limited to games that don't utilize relative mouse motion, like RTS or simulation games.
If your device is rooted, you may try the APK named 'app-root-release.apk' on the Moonlight Android releases page. This version of Moonlight uses root access to capture the mouse pointer on older Android devices.
Android's mouse capture API does not allow apps to opt-out of mouse acceleration. The result is that your mouse may be accelerated twice, once by Android and once by Windows, leading to difficulty controlling the mouse.
If possible, you can disable mouse acceleration in your game as a workaround.
NVIDIA has implemented a custom method for disabling mouse acceleration on their own SHIELD Android devices. Moonlight uses this support to provide proper non-accelerated mouse support on NVIDIA Shield Android devices. Unfortunately, there is no generic solution for other Android devices.
macOS performs periodic background WiFi scans for Location and AirDrop. While the WiFi radio is scanning, it cannot send or receive traffic. The result is that video and audio data is delayed or dropped during these scans. The result is perceived as stuttering video and audio.
To minimize background scans that lead to stuttering, try disabling AirDrop and Location Services.
Other video applications like Netflix or YouTube keep a buffer of some data which smooths over these small glitches. Real-time streaming apps like Moonlight can't buffer data because it would introduce significant latency. As a result, Moonlight and other game streaming apps are much more sensitive to small glitches in your network performance.
There is a bug in GeForce Experience which causes it to believe that RTX 3000-series GPUs do not support HEVC encoding.
A hotfix from NVIDIA is available here.
There is extra overhead to stream the desktop when Optimus is enabled, because each frame must be copied back from the iGPU to the NVIDIA GPU for NVENC to encode it. This extra copying overhead usually results in frame rates between 25 and 40 FPS while streaming the desktop.
Once you start a full-screen game, the streaming performance should go back to normal. If it doesn't, make sure your game is set to run on the NVIDIA GPU and that your game is set to use full-screen exclusive mode instead of borderless windowed mode.
Have a question or problem that isn't addressed here? Try asking on our Discord server!