What Quasar is

Quasar is a self-hostable cloud gaming platform. Games run in containers on GPU machines you own, and you play them in a browser tab on whatever device is in front of you. The reference point most people find useful is GeForce Now, except the servers are yours and so is the library.

A session looks like this. You log in, pick something from your library, and press play. Quasar finds a GPU host with capacity, starts the game in a container, captures its output through a Wayland compositor, encodes it on the GPU, and sends video, audio and input straight to your browser over WebRTC. When you close the tab, the session ends and the container stops.

What you get

Multiple GPU hosts, one library. Quasar was built around a control plane that owns accounts and scheduling, and node agents that own GPUs. Add a second GPU box and it joins the pool. Sessions get placed on whichever host has room.

Multiple users. Every user gets their own persistent home directory, their own save games, and their own entitlements to apps. Registration can be closed, invite-only, or open.

Hardware encoding on AMD, Intel and NVIDIA. Auto-detection defaults AMD and NVIDIA to Vulkan Video and Intel to VA-API. Vendor encoders remain available as explicit choices and per-codec fallbacks. Frames can stay in GPU memory through the encode path.

Adaptive bitrate. The stream measures the network continuously and adjusts. This is on by default and tuned for smoothness rather than for chasing the highest possible bitrate.

A browser client, with nothing to install. Chrome and Chromium-based browsers on desktop. Gamepads work through the Gamepad API. Keyboard, mouse and touch work. There is no launcher and no client binary.

An admin area. Apps, images, stream profiles, hosts, GPUs, sessions and users are all managed from /admin in the same web app.

What Quasar is not

It does not speak Moonlight or GameStream. This is a deliberate and permanent decision, not a gap waiting to be filled. NVIDIA discontinued GameStream, and building on a dead protocol to reach existing clients was not worth the architecture it forces. Moonlight clients cannot connect to Quasar and never will.

It is not a game store. Quasar launches container images. Getting games into those containers is your problem, the same way it is on any self-hosted setup. Steam is supported as a library provider, so a Steam container can surface your owned titles as launchable tiles.

It is not built to face the internet. Play happens over a LAN or a VPN. Quasar has not been security reviewed or tested against hostile traffic, and exposing it on a public address is discouraged. See Reaching Quasar remotely.

It has no native client yet. The browser is the only client. A native client is planned and some of the groundwork exists, but nothing is shippable.

Who this suits

Quasar suits you if you already run a homelab, own a machine with a decent GPU that sits idle most of the day, and want to play the games on it from a laptop, a tablet, or a TV without moving hardware around. It suits households where one GPU is shared. It suits anyone who wants their save games on storage they control.

It suits you less if you want to play over the public internet from anywhere with no VPN, if you want a one-click appliance, or if you are not comfortable with Docker and a Linux host.

Where Quasar came from

Quasar reuses two components from the Wolf project (MIT): the gst-wayland-display Wayland compositor and inputtino virtual input. Both are excellent and there was no reason to rewrite them.

Quasar goes a different direction from Wolf rather than replacing it. Wolf grew from a single-host, single-user core and speaks Moonlight. Quasar starts from multi-host and multi-user, and streams to browsers. If Moonlight compatibility is what you want, Wolf is the better answer and you should use it.

Next

• How it works explains the moving parts you will meet in the admin area.
• Requirements tells you whether your hardware qualifies before you spend 25 minutes on a build.