So a little background.

I have an RTX 4090, Ryzen 7700X, and 32GB of ram.

(side note: I’m thankful I just found the receipts, you’ll see why in a moment, but I paid $2200 CAD for everything but the GPU in 2022)

My PSU died, and I’m looking at a warranty now with EVGA for it.

What I’m thinking about, is racking the PC in my basement, and stream to my TVs.

The nicest TV is 4K@120Hz HDR.

I have a 10Gb backbone for my home networking, wired back to a mikrotik switch in my basement racked.

I’d like to run a headless box, and use those components to be able to game stream to thin clients around my house.

I tried moonlight before, not headless mind you, but the lack of virtual monitor support on KDE meant I couldn’t adjust resolutions to be higher than the output of the monitor plugged in.

Any thoughts on how to do this?

  • Dr. WeskerEnglish
    91·
    19 hours ago

    I went down this route 2025 and gave up, because the latency just wasn’t acceptable for most games I wanted to play. The PC is still racked, but now I just use a long HDMI and USB-C run to a dedicated gaming monitor and peripheral hub.

  • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    20 hours ago

    https://www.amazon.com/DIOOEER-Dummy-Headless-Adapter-Emulator/dp/B0HBQJQSDS

    This might not be what you want specifically, but this is the kind of thing that came to mind. Basically a stub that feeds EDID data into the GPU so it THINKS there is a physical monitor with any resolution you want connected.

    There are more advanced models out there that will allow you to custom program the EDID that it feeds, so you can use higher resolution or frame rate or whatever.

      • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        19 hours ago

        Another solution I’ve played around with, but it didn’t work super well… would be krfb-virtualmonitor

        KDE’s remote framebuffer tool for making a virtual monitor to VNC into. For me it didnt do what i wanted because I have 3 other monitors and I couldn’t assure that things would launch directly into the virtual monitor… and it doesnt support any sort of dynamic resizing… But there might be something there.

        I also hope that this kind of stuff improves in the future because of the Steam Frame. In Tested’s video, he calls out that he can only stream games at 21:9 if his 21:9 monitor is on. And other VR friends have pointed out the desire to dynamically resize content in the headset. So maybe this will get better in the future.

        For me the issue is that i have a OLED 21:9 desktop, and streaming to my Steam Deck risks burn in on my desktop, and annoying black bars on my steam deck… I’d love to just have a 1280x800 faux monitor to stream to my steam deck, nothing needs to be visible on the desktop (headless, like you want).

        But anyway tl;dr - krfb-virtualmonitor vaguely worked but not for what i needed. Virtual monitors are definitely a possibility

    • gabmus@retrolemmy.comEnglish
      3·
      20 hours ago

      I’ve used something like this in the past and it worked perfectly. I needed it to access my pc remotely without having my physical monitor turned on for no reason (I’d have used ssh but I needed to run graphical software)

  • scutiger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    16 hours ago

    Have you tried running your games with gamescope? I don’t know if it will work, but it lets you define a screen resolution and a render resolution on launch. If you launch Steam under gamescope, then games launched by Steam will also run under the same instance.

  • jwiggler@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    19 hours ago

    You can do virtual monitor now on kde. look into krfb. i have it working to stream my desktop to dynamic clients around the house. creates a virtual monitor according to the resolution the client (running moonlight) requests. no dummy dongle or messing with edids.

    EDIT: heres the thread that unlocked it all for me https://www.reddit.com/r/MoonlightStreaming/comments/1tg1dnc/guide_sunshine_on_kde_wayland_virtual_display/

  • Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    19 hours ago

    Check out games on whales https://games-on-whales.github.io/

    I’ve used it a bit to play kingdom hearts on my tv from my laptop, and it works well. It uses sunshine/moonlight on the back, and manages containers for you. Gamepad from 8bitdo is connected via Bluetooth to the tv and it works no problem.

    I’m not a heavy gamer though, so there might be problems I either don’t notice or just live with. Laptop is running Bazzite, but I don’t think that matters.

    Edit: the tv is a tcl android tv, nothing special really. Moonlight is installed straight to the TV.

  • MuttMutt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    18 hours ago

    I just use steam. The remote play works fine. You can actually access the full desktop by going into the steam software menu. My desktop is Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04LTS, ryzen 5800x, 9070xt, 32gb ram, and 4tb nvme. My client is an Asus ROG G75VW - i7 3610QM, GTX 660M running Ubuntu Budgie 24.04LTS.

    I’ve played games, edited video, and other standard pc stuff this way without issue. I have two monitors connected to my desktop, one is a 32" 1440p 144hz landscape orientation via display port the other is a 24" 1080p 60 hz portrait orientation via HDMI. So can’t say much about resolution output and frequency compatibility.

  • Tobias Schmidl@sueden.social
    1·
    18 hours ago

    @wholookshere I have this setup running. AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32 GiB RAM, RX 9060 XT, headless under #debian #trixie.
    First I tried to go with a virtual monitor (kernel parameteramdgpu.virtual\_display). That was a total PITA. a small HDMI EDID adaptor for 20 Buck off amazon did the trick. Then autologin into KDE, and #sunshine works just fine.
    Decent networking is important, I started with WIFI 7, and… that’s fine *most of the time*, but then I upgraded to PLC.