MacBook Air M1 really bad phantom latency

[Kamryx]

Recently got an M1 MacBook Air almost solely for the purpose of using as a Moonlight game streaming client... and it's kind of unusable. And I have no idea why.

When using the stats overlay, everything looks flawless. Total combined latency is like under 10ms. I've tried to test and control for every variable; using a controller on a native game, works fine, no noticeable controller or display refresh latency, etc. It's specifically when streaming, specifically on this MacBook. I have an Intel N100 mini PC which is even slower than this MacBook and it performs flawlessly. Oh, MacBook is Ethernet wired by the way. I've tried every obvious thing to think of.

One extra potentially useful piece of information, it seems to be happening worse in some specific games I'm trying to stream. For example, Battlefield 6 just has horrible, what feels like 400ms latency when streaming. But Destiny 2 feels closer to like 100. My PC host handles both of those games with absolute ease, no lag at all. But it's almost like the MacBook is somehow lagging more dependent on the game I'm streaming which makes no sense.

Any ideas? Really confused and would love to fix this

[ClassicOldSong]

Macs are probably not a good candidate as clients. I have a M4 Mac mini and it suffers from similar issues.

What’s weird is, my M1 iPad even performs better in most cases…

I actually think it might be how the Qt client is written might not work well for macOS, so it might be fixed if we can make a true native version for macOS.