The first step is actually going to be holding your power button and selecting “Switch to Desktop”. With all that established, let’s get into how to actually acquire Moonlight for your Steam Deck. And in my own experience, I’ve had much better performance and input responsiveness on Moonlight compared to Steam Deck. Even if you need to do some tweaks besides adding it to Nvidia GameStream on your desktop, Moonlight’s desktop control is seamless and will allow you to make things work that wouldn’t with the usual Deck game streaming. With Moonlight, it’s much easier to stream non-Steam games to your Deck. The issue is, like with Steam’s actual non-Steam game compatibility on your desktop, is that Steam’s own streaming just doesn’t work as well with non-Steam games.

After all, the Deck’s use of Steam’s own game streaming (In-Home Streaming, also called Steam Link) technology is pretty good, and even works with non-Steam games you have added to Steam. Now if you’re an experienced Steam Deck user, this may sound a little extraneous. With Moonlight, you can turn your Steam Deck into an Nvidia GameStream-compatible client device while still utilizing GameStream’s superb stream quality and low-input-lag streaming. Nvidia GameStream requires an Nvidia desktop GPU on the host PC, and is meant to only use compatible Nvidia Shield devices as clients. Moonlight is an open-source client for Nvidia’s GameStream technology.

How To Configure Moonlight on Steam Deck.

How To Add Non-Steam Games on Steam Deck.How To Download Moonlight on Steam Deck.

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