Hi Raadon,
I don’t have super experience with all the tech details either, but I did test Sunshine on a Raspberry Pi 5. Even there the CPU quickly goes to 100% and the stream starts stuttering, so you don’t get a stable 30 FPS.
Right now Sunshine on the Pi only uses CPU (software encoding), not GPU. That means the processor has to do both the game and the video compression at the same time. On a Pi Zero 2W this will be far too heavy – if it already struggles on a Pi 5, the Zero has no chance.
So unfortunately it’s not really realistic to run games on the Pi itself and stream them out with Sunshine. I find it a pity too, I had hoped it might get better with the upcoming Raspberry Pi OS / Debian 13, but sadly for now the Pi just can’t handle it.
And yes, I saw you’re using RetroPie – that’s fine for emulators, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Pi still has to do all the video encoding on its CPU.
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I don’t have super experience with all the tech details either, but I did test Sunshine on a Raspberry Pi 5. Even there the CPU quickly goes to 100% and the stream starts stuttering, so you don’t get a stable 30 FPS.
Right now Sunshine on the Pi only uses CPU (software encoding), not GPU. That means the processor has to do both the game and the video compression at the same time. On a Pi Zero 2W this will be far too heavy – if it already struggles on a Pi 5, the Zero has no chance.
So unfortunately it’s not really realistic to run games on the Pi itself and stream them out with Sunshine. I find it a pity too, I had hoped it might get better with the upcoming Raspberry Pi OS / Debian 13, but sadly for now the Pi just can’t handle it.
And yes, I saw you’re using RetroPie – that’s fine for emulators, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Pi still has to do all the video encoding on its CPU.
Statistics: Posted by Wobbo — Sat Sep 20, 2025 9:05 pm