Sunshine Adds HDR Support and More in Newest Update

When it comes to streaming your games on the Steam Deck, there are a couple of options. There are services like GeForce NOW and xCloud to stream your games from the cloud, and we have options like Moonlight or Remote Play to stream from another computer you have locally. Moonlight is generally the go-to when it comes to host PCs with Nvidia cards, but if you have a different GPU, like AMD, Sunshine will be your go-to. And, with its newest update, we have some nice new features and improvements, including HDR support on Linux!

Sunshine is a game stream host that works with Moonlight, which can offer low latency cloud gaming server capabilities that support AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs. This works with both hardware and software encoding, and it has a web UI to allow for configuring and client pairing from the local server. This means we have a fantastic client to stream games from our desktop computers locally to any device, and yes, this includes the Steam Deck.

So, with their newest update, 0.22.0, we have a solid amount of additions, changes, fixes, dependency updates, and more! As noted above, we now have HDR streaming support for Linux using the KMS capture backend, and this includes KMS capture support for Nvidia GPUs running Wayland. We also have native and pen touch support for Linux devices, which comes with a new setting to disable high-resolution scrolling. There are some additions for Windows devices too, which includes additional NVENC encoding settings, a control for GPU power saving and latency tradeoff, and experimental support for launching URLs and other non-exe files.

As for other changes, we also have 2560x1440 added to the default resolutions, improved VAAPI encoding on Intel GPUs, updated Desktop files, fixes for excessive CPU usage when using wlroots capture backend, and the capture of virtual displays created by the amdgpu kernel driver, and a modernization of the default Steam app shortcut to avoid depending on the install location. They also dropped Fedora 37 support, and the client must now be paired with the host before they can use the Wake-on-LAN feature to wake up their computers with the device they are streaming to.

Overall, there are a TON of improvements, additions, and changes, with many that I didn't list! You can check out the full changelog, as well as download the new version, from their Github page. You can also download Sunshine from the Discover Store, but as of this writing, it hasn't been updated to 0.22.0 yet.

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