Moonlight is easy to set up
When I say “Moonlight” I actually refer to a combination of apps, which encompasses a server program (called Sunshine) running on your gaming PC, and a streaming client (Moonlight) on your Android TV. The Sunshine server app can be downloaded from the official website, but for your Chromecast or other Android TV box, you can just use the Play Store to find the Moonlight client. Once both are set up and running, your Moonlight app on the Android TV box should be able to detect the Sunshine server on your PC, as long as both devices are on the same network. When you see your PC, you can make a connection request, and your PC will see a notification. Enter the PIN shown on your TV to link your two devices, so you can start streaming from your PC at any time.
It actually works
Even in less-than-ideal conditions
My house’s networking installation isn’t really set up in a way that allows me to use Ethernet for my computer, so my testing here was entirely done over Wi-Fi, and using a slightly older gaming laptop from 2021 (an Asus ROG Flow X13), so your experience may be a lot better than mine. But even for me, this solution worked surprisingly well in the games I tested. The game that seemed to struggle the most was Rocket League, where I occasionally encountered slight stutters while playing online. There were things I could probably have tried, though, starting with lowering the frame rate on the PC itself to 60FPS to match the stream, but I still found the game to be playable, though I’m admittedly a casual player, and a bad one at that. For everything else I tried, which includes Elden Ring, Saints Row IV, Risk of Rain 2, and the early preview demo for Grip XR, the experience was pretty solid across the board. I occasionally saw performance stutters, but this laptop also struggles to run some of these games in the first place. In the case of Grip XR specifically, I was able to verify that the stutters were also happening on the laptop itself. This all happened with both the computer and the Chromecast connected via Wi-Fi, though both devices were in the same room as the router, so there was no reason for things to work terribly either. Still, I stuck to a 720p stream, and I saw a “slow connection” message a couple of times; that probably wouldn’t happen with a wired connection to your desktop PC. I’d wager you can take the quality higher with that kind of setup and a more powerful PC.
Use your PC’s power
Your TV box doesn’t need to be fancy
The most important part of this is that you can save a lot of money turning your living room into a console experience, because you don’t really need your TV box to be powerful. Using this method, all your games run on your desktop PC, leveraging the full power of that CPU and GPU, so you can raise graphics settings and have a smoother experience than you’d probably have with something like a Steam Machine. I tested this with a Chromecast with Google TV (4K), which is coming up on its sixth anniversary, but it didn’t really matter because all this device does is stream a video feed from my PC, which does all the heavy lifting. So even if you have Android TV built right into the TV itself or an older box, you can still enjoy high-end PC gaming on your TV, so long as that power is somewhere in your house. If you don’t have Android TV, one of these devices is far cheaper than buying a Steam Machine or a mini PC for your living room. A brand-new Google TV Streamer 4K costs 0 without discounts, and a Steam Machine costs over ,000. And you can probably make do with a cheaper secondhand unit, too.
Moonlight is a game-changer
I’ve never been a fan of cloud streaming, but streaming games on your own network is a fantastic way to make them available on all your devices with no extra cost, and that’s exactly what Moonlight does. In addition to Android TV, it also has Apple TV apps, and there’s even a community port for LG’s webOS TVs, so you can play your games easily on almost any kind of device, without the huge upfront cost of a new PC or console. Streaming quality is better than you might think, and your gaming PC can do a lot better rendering those games than a compact living room PC would.
