Sunshine game streaming tool adds Vulkan encoding plus XDG, Pipewire, and KWin direct screencast capture

Sunshine, the game streaming tool you use with Moonlight, has a major upgrade now available with some big new features and a security fix too.

What exactly is it? Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight. Offering low latency, cloud gaming server capabilities with support for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs for hardware encoding. Software encoding is also available. You can connect to Sunshine from any Moonlight client on a variety of devices. A web UI is provided to allow configuration, and client pairing, from your favourite web browser. Pair from the local server or any mobile device.

People often prefer it over the likes of Steam Remote Play as it has a lot more features, and often better quality and performance too.

Sunshine v2026.516.143833 was released May 16th, a necessary update due to critical security updates. But, thanks to that, a whole bunch of new features landed too including:

• Added XDG, Pipewire, and KWin direct screencast capture on Linux.
• Added Vulkan encoding on Linux.
• Added official OpenSUSE packages to LizardByte copr repos.
• Added FreeBSD packages.
• Sunshine can now bind to a specific network interface.
• Added msi/wix installer for Windows.
• Added Windows support for ARM64.
• Added signed dmg package for macOS.
• Windows executables and installers are now signed for AMD64 packages.
• New endpoints for Rest API [/api/covers].
• Updated icons, added themes, and modernized web-ui.
• Capture audio on macOS using Tap API.
• Add client enable/disable access control from web-ui.
• Support for clients to request fractional NTSC framerates.
• Support for split frame encoding on GPUs with 2+ nvenc blocks.
• Updated FFmpeg to 8.1 branch.

See the release post for more.