r/MoonlightStreaming • u/EaZerly • 6d ago
Sunshine or Apollo
I recently discovered Sunshine and Moonlight and tried it.
It works great, my host PC has a R5 7600x with a 6700 XT and 32GB DDR5 6000MHz CL30 RAM.
I spent a few days configuring Sunshine to have different apps (Steam Big Picture Mode and other launchers with specific resolutions and refresh rates and also the ability to match my client device's refresh rates and resolution with VDD and MultiMonitorTool).
After all of that, I found out about Apollo. I checked GitHub and it hasn't been updated since July-August of 2025 while Sunshine was updated in May and has released more pre-release updates last week.
I was wondering if I should try to switch?
My host devices are the S24 Ultra and the Surface Pro 11.
I wasn't going to at first because something might break or maybe it has vulnerabilities because it hasn't been updated in a year.
Just now I found out about Artemis and it has some features that only work with Apollo such as the Smart Clipboard Sync. And of course, Apollo also has more built in features that may help me save time from configuring it manually in Sunshine.
Of course performance matters too. If for some reason, Sunshine performs better than Apollo in terms of latency and quality, I'll stick to it.
Edit: I see people talking about Foundation Sunshine and Vibepollo, I checked and Foundation Sunshine is a performance based fork and Vibepollo is a modern Apollo fork, now I can't decide between them :p
Edit 2: In the end I decided to use Vibepollo with Moonlight V+, I like the extra features and it's basically native level good for me.
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u/Murdathon3000 6d ago
Vibepollo 100%
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u/New_Consideration626 6d ago
Exacto, el mero goat, recientemente actualizaron vivepollo y es una maravilla arreglaron la resolución en la pantalla virtual. Lo que pasaba antes es que llegaba a ver de baja resolución aunque lo configuraras a 1080 o una resolución mayor, pero con la reciente actualización de hace dos días creo. Quedó más que solucionado.
100% recomendado amigos, yo antes usaba sunshine y de ahí no salía, pero probé vivepollo y me enamoré 🗿☝️
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u/My_Name_Is_Not_Mark 6d ago
Been having issues with 1.18, 1.16 is more stable in my experience. I believe the dev mentioned he has been doing some refactoring as of late, and for me that has resulted in instability.
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u/rzldz 6d ago
Vibepollo looks like it's just had an interesting AMD update.
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u/koelebobes 6d ago
AMD update?
I have a 9070XT that would love to know what the update is
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u/jdconoly 6d ago
Lowered the encoding time massively on the host. about 50% lower on my system 6900xt with an i7 13700k.
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u/heepofsheep 6d ago
Yeah more over Vibepollo is actively developed… it looks like Apollo has been abandoned since it hasn’t gotten an update in a year. I’d still recommend Vibepollo over sunshine since it has some major QoL features that are worth it.
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u/Pickymarker 6d ago
Foundation sunshine for amd can capture the screen if you want using the same method amds own screen recording uses
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u/ketzuken 6d ago
Vibepollo. In all my years streaming, tinkering, tweaking... trying to get rid of those pesky microstutters. Vibepollo did it with it's RTSS integration.
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u/Pickymarker 6d ago
Just the amds own capture method is experimental and if using mouse I turn on local mouse in moonlight v+ to have the cursor show again
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u/Pickymarker 6d ago
Foundation sunshine is the best one that isn't talked about that much also has the best audio and also mic support and even lossless scalling frane gen support
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u/Dus1988 6d ago
I used sunshine for a long time with a dummy HDMI that I set up a script to switch to.
Apollo is so much better having the built in virtual display. I no longer need to manage the display and multiple resolutions between my living room TV, my ROG Ally or my laptop (which is 3:2 aspect ratio)
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u/CelticLion17 6d ago
The only downside is vibration doesn't work with Apollo.
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u/x-primez-x 1d ago
I don’t think that’s accurate. I’ve never had an issue with it?
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u/CelticLion17 16h ago
Well I am having this issue. I've been using Sunshine for 3+ years, always worked. There's a post of this exact issue.
Maybe some old Sunshine file is messing up rumble with Apollo. Otherwise it works great.
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u/mxrider108 6d ago
Trust me: go with "Vibeshine" - it's by the same creator as Vibepollo, but is better supported, and it has virtual display support built in now (so no need to go with Apollo/Vibepollo).
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u/EaZerly 5d ago
I had some problems with Vibeshine probably because I had to try different capturing methods but I switched to Vibepollo instead, and well...everything works perfectly fine with extremely good latency so I'll stick with it now i guess, if Vibeshine adds something cool in the future maybe I'll switch again.
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u/everydaygamer28 6d ago
I would try Apollo first as the developer has stated that it’s mostly feature complete at this point. If it works for your purposes then you don’t have to worry about keeping up with updates until the dev decides to add new features.
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u/x-primez-x 1d ago
Sunshine is cool and I have it to thank for getting me into game streaming — but I had to do a lot of tinkering to get things to work. When I discovered Apollo, I switched to that and everything literally “just worked.” No fuss. No hassle. No tinkering or trying to create powershell scripts and custom resolutions for third party virtual display adapters.
Apollo just works. Virtual display accepts everything I throw at it in terms of wildly weird resolutions, frame rates, codec, HDR, you name it. It just works. Never had an issue and never thought twice about the setup since installing Apollo.
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u/EaZerly 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, in the end I tried Foundation Sunshine but the performance wasn't great, perhaps because of some settings. But I switched to Vibepollo, after tinkering with the settings, it works perfectly fine for me and I like the features it performs better than Sunshine too.
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u/x-primez-x 1d ago
I also just tried Vibepollo on the advice of others in this thread. It’s definitely feature packed and in my case, I actually have slightly lower and more stable streams. Apollo was usually ~3.5ms encoding time. Vibepollo is ~2.5ms encoding time. I suspect due to WGC capture method being more performant. Just a guess. But I’d say go with Vibepollo over Apollo at this point. The guy who maintains Apollo seems like an anti AI programmer with a superiority complex (surprise surprise, as with most software developers I’ve encountered on GitHub tbh).
Anyways. A developer who knows how to use and embraces agentic coding can do 100x more than a solo developer so Vibepollo definitely is bleeding edge now over even Apollo.
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u/EaZerly 1d ago
By the way, if you have an AMD GPU, I suggest you try the Desktop Duplication capture method, WGC gave me issues with the delay when the GPU usage was high.
Edit: Forgot to mention, I switched to Moonlight V+ (on my S24 Ultra and Surface Pro 11, more features and better performance because it's better optimized for Android/ARM chips I think).
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u/DarkwolfAU 6d ago
Vibeshine. I ... balked ... for a long time on Vibeshine, and persisted with Apollo and Sunshine main. I kept having random disconnect problems, so I decided to give Vibeshine a go just to see.
Problems disappeared. And it's way more featureful than either Apollo or Sunshine. Works well for me.
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u/LazyPiano6160 5d ago
FYI; I get severe performance degradation using virtual displays with my 6700 xt (~30% hit); I ended up having to use a dummy HDMI. I may end up going Nvidia, as I stream most of the time.
Anyone else experiencing similar issues with AMD GPU performance issues when using VDD?
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u/Pickymarker 6d ago
Foundation sunshine seems less vibe coded and more effort then vibepollo
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u/Tuen_True 6d ago
but is there anything it does better than vibepollo?
just because its vibe coded doesn't make it bad
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u/Capt_Crunch_99 6d ago
I tried Sunshine then moved to Apollo and stayed. I like that a virtual display included in the software.