Oh, Need for Speed! I still break out the originals like NFS III Hot Pursuit when I want to focus on a podcast or an audio book, but don’t want my mind to wonder. Letting my visual and motor cortex enter a flow state while doing timed laps pacifies my ADHD, keeping me on track to complete any audible reading, pun intended. It also helps having all the maps memorized from nostalgia.

Emulating the PS1 and PS2 titles is an option, but there are modern patches of the PC ports that improve the ergonomics of running them on current operating systems, including Wine and Proton:

• Need For Speed III Modern Patch v1.6.1 [2016/10/28] (HD + Widescreen + Portable)
  • https://veg.by/en/projects/nfs3/

Another racing series with a similar flow vibe could be the Track Mania titles. Forza Horizon is a little flashy, but if you create a waypoint race route and then avoid the finish line, you can then free roam without traffic making for a relaxing and scenic diving game. The Hot Wheels DLC for Forza Horizon is also rather zen once you get a grasp for the different gravity and motion model dynamics.

• Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels on Steam
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1613280/Forza_Horizon_5_Hot_Wheels/

Additional notable zen like titles, with less arcade driving:

• Absolute Drift
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/320140/Absolute_Drift/
• over the hill (unreleased)
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/2929250/over_the_hill/?curator_clanid=33179407

Awesome to hear, and thanks for the citations! Much appreciated.

Besides the number of greater features that sunshine has added, are there any performance benchmarks to compare the two? Like for 4K HDR @ 120Hz in terms of latency or efficiency in the graphics capture pipelines? Always figured Nvidia could be leveraging their proprietary driver APIs more effectively given they can optimize and control the entire graphics pipeline, end to end.

I’m surprised I couldn’t yet find a dummy HDMI plug to spoof a 4K@120Hz capable display. All the ones I’ve found thus far only support 120Hz at 1080p, and never any HDR support at all. I have an OLED android device with 2K screen and matching refresh rate, but the without a physical monitor to stream capturing from. Emulating such display resolutions and colored depths also seems just as formidably challenging.

Aside from my PC, the newest device I own is only a snapdragon 8 gen 1 soc device, which I think sadly doesn’t have a hardware AV1 decider. Definitely a consideration for later upgrades.

Any recommendations for fine tuning Sunshine to match Nvidia’s local Gamestream? I haven’t had much luck in getting Sunshine to run as smoothly at 4K 120Hz HDR 150Mbps via LAN as Nvidia’s deprecated streaming server software, so have to slow to migrate over.