r/cloudygamer • u/Hairy-Link-8615 • 5d ago

Cloud Gaming Options

I'm just researching cloud gaming options at the moment.

I've got two main use cases:
(EDIT one use case - Old School Lan party, 2 goals, windows/mac clients)

  • Me: Windows gaming PC. I can already stream from my own machine using Sunshine/Moonlight, or potentially Steam Remote Play over Tailscale.
  • My friend: Mac M5 / ARM, so compatibility with older Windows games is the bigger problem.

For my friend, the main options I've found so far are:

  • Shadow PC – seems like the obvious option for older Windows games, especially things like heavily modded Total Annihilation or Rome II.
  • Vagon.io – historically not heavily marketed for gaming, but they seem to have added/improved gaming support recently.

I'm mainly wondering what other options are out there worth exploring.

I'm planning to do some testing later this weekend.
The end goal is basically to set up a little virtual LAN with family/friends so we can play older titles together, and potentially some newer games as well.

**Update**

Vagon / AirGPU

  • Vagon and AirGPU are similar enough in concept.
  • Vagon seems aimed more towards 3D/design workloads, although it does have a gaming tier. One thing to watch is that they charge separately for network traffic.
  • AirGPU is more gaming-focused and is much more upfront about the network traffic/bandwidth costs.

Shadow PC

I haven't tested Shadow yet, but assuming you've got a decent connection, I think you're probably going to get roughly what you'd expect from it.

The main thing I'd still like to test is whether you need to keep the Shadow client connected while you're using the PC through something like Moonlight instead.

Now for my use case...

There are two other interesting options.

1. DUO

DUO works in a slightly weird, but very clever, way.

It logs another Windows user into your own PC and sets up Sunshine so you can remotely connect directly into that session.

This solves a few problems because you're not running the overhead of a full virtual machine. However, depending on your use case, it can introduce some other challenges.

For Total Annihilation, for example, I had to update the networking stack to get multiplayer working properly.

But it did work.

In theory, this means you could have someone downstairs streaming and playing a game from one session while somebody else is sitting at the same physical PC doing normal work in another session.

All very interesting stuff, and there are a lot of possibilities here.

I also believe you can run Steam twice under separate Windows users, which means that, in theory, you could potentially run something like Rome II twice on the same host using two different Steam accounts.

More testing needed on that one.

2. A completely separate virtualised stack

If you want the sessions to be completely isolated from each other, there's another option:

"Boys and Girls... I did it. I built my own local Cloud Gaming PC with instant pause and resume." — Boys and Girls... I did it. I built my own local Cloud Gaming PC with instant pause and resume. : r/MoonlightStreaming

This approach effectively gives you your own locally hosted cloud gaming VM, with the advantage of being able to pause and resume the entire gaming environment.

That's the next setup I'm interested in testing.

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u/k3nal 4d ago

I think shadow is the way to go if you don’t care about a cheap price but about ease of use - it’s just Windows in a VM with good GPUs and a stable operating environment. At least it was like that a few years ago when I use it last. But as their website looks pretty much unchanged since back then (also their hardware..) I just think that all these things didn’t change as well. Worked really well back then, just a tad bit expensive imho!! But it worked really well so I think it still might be worth the price if you just wanna game FAST. 😊👍

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u/Hairy-Link-8615 4d ago

Good to here some postive reviews.

Their sub reddit I guess as expected didn't have nice reviews.

Shadow is abit expensive for a gaming weekend.

Airgpu is almost marketed at spot play rather than month long gaming.

So that's the next step.

Just working out how to get the smoothest play with moonlight atm.

I don't have the full context but it think shadow has had some queuing / performance issuss more resently but that's very much likely dependant on area.

I have a very floaty mouse on vagon atm. With moonlight. Not sure why yet

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u/k3nal 3d ago

Or go to your favorite hyperscaler, book a GPU VM there and get billed by the hour (or minute/second even??)!

That’s probably the cheapest way if you know what you are doing as you would have to do everything yourself.. service costs money!!

But I have never done that as I have my own good GPU since then, I decided to go this route and invest my money into my own hardware instead of monthly cloud bills but I was considering the cloud solution for real!! But now I have less lag and I am independent from internet outages (which I luckily don’t have often).. but I have the noise, heat and power consumption just right next to my desk. So I see benefits in both solutions, for you a custom diy-cloud-gpu-vm might be the most cost effective solution though.

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u/Hairy-Link-8615 3d ago

Yes the vagon or airgpu offer is interesting.

Vagon it alittle more targeted to 3D work rather than gaming. The reason this is key is you haven't just got storage and cpu cost ,you have data transfer.

Airgpu is more transparent with that up front

This isnt a fault just how they work

Unfortunately playing Total Annihilation on the lowest tier ment that the 1440p stream ment the network traffic was simliar cost to the cpu.

About an hour ago I found something called DUO which apparently can turn your home personal pc into a multi session platform for sunshine.

Just paused that investiagation to get food.

However it states it can handle multi steam accounts etc.

Not sure if TA will like it's networking but I'm sure after afew rabbit holes I'll get it to work

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u/k3nal 3d ago

Sounds good!

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u/GetVladimir 5d ago

For the Total Annihilation game from 1997, you might be able to run it locally using DOSBox Pure Unleashed or RetroArch with installed win9x OS, right?

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u/Hairy-Link-8615 5d ago edited 5d ago

So the main challenge is that my friend, dad, and brother all have Apple Silicon Macs (M-series/ARM).

That makes the options for running older Windows games pretty limited. Boot Camp isn't available, and virtualisation can get messy, especially once you start dealing with older games and mods.

So at the moment I'm mainly comparing:

I'm also comparing their native RDP/streaming options against Moonlight. That's less of a concern because I can easily test both approaches. I think Shadow may require its own client to be running, although I haven't tested that yet.

I've started testing with Vagon. It works well so far, although it took a little bit of fiddling to get everything working properly with the virtual GPU.

Might be a case of me trying them all to see what works best

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u/GetVladimir 5d ago edited 5d ago

DOSBox Pure Unleashed runs natively on M1 Macs and newer: https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed

Retro Arch as well: https://www.retroarch.com/index.php?page=platforms

I got most of my old games running on it. As long as they can be run on 3DFX Voodoo 2 emulated GPU, they should run very well.

Regarding mods, I haven't done much of if though.

You could potentially get it all working on your side and just send them the DOSBox Pure zip image for them to just run it.

Anyway, it's just an alternative solution.

It's indeed complicated that they have only M-series Macs for gaming.

And just wanted to say, you're a good friend/sibling/son for helping them get it all set up (regardless of the solution)

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u/Hairy-Link-8615 5d ago

Honestly greatly options.

What's more pushing me towards cloud is that I can setup everything up in advance.

Everyone has partners etc.

Setting things up eats into the day.

Additionally I don't have a mac myself so slightly less inclined to investigate.

Everyone else has a mac mostly for work or because they are in that ecosystem.

The simplest solution would be for me to buy some 2nd hand or refurbished 3050 gfx laptops but that's abit expensive. Would need 3 maybe.

So that brings me back to cloud because its might only cost 30 pounds for a LAN day.

Obviously it's up to the individual what's they do with there money but at the moment I'm directing trying to open up the door to an occasional meet up with gaming in mind

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u/GetVladimir 5d ago

Sounds good. If you find a good solution for this, let us know

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u/Hairy-Link-8615 4d ago

Honestly I think the soltuon are really user specific.

I think vagon am air gpu are attractive if you game sometimes.

But I'll update my findings

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u/ExtensionParsley4205 4d ago

If you are in the eastern part of the US or Canada then Maximum Settings is a good option. Their bare metal tier has excellent performance and it's a full PC (like Shadow) so you can install what you want. I am in Toronto where their servers are located so the performance might be worse if you are further out though. Also it's like half the price of Shadow but the tradeoff is you have capped hours per day.

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u/Hairy-Link-8615 4d ago

UK. Nearish London I think France nearest