Showerthoughts: why not stream the entire OS at this point, with a dedicated storage? Like an EC2 with a desktop environment that you can access in a VNC-like way but with the resolution, FPS and input responsiveness similar to what Stadia/Mighty offers.
Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).
Since you'll need an OS (a minimal one but still) on the client side, you can reduce the bandwidth required by sending paint commands to draw the UI locally (on the client) and just send the resources on the wire as well as updates. [0]
I've been using Shadow for a year and that's exactly what it does. It's a standard windows box and you can install whatever you want on it, and there's no usage limits. I use it to play windows games on my mac without fussing with dual booting. I played through the Witcher 3 entirely on that machine. :)
Non action games are playable over Wifi, but on a wired connection it's much better. It does have its own client and disconnects if you are idle so I don't think you could run it as a server, but I never tried.
The only odd issue I ran into is that it supports a virtual USB device for pass-through which is cool, but you can't use a fancy multi-button mouse as that USB device because the mouse is "special" and it's always a 2 button virtual mouse but the xbox controller worked just fine.
They do have a fairly slow rollout of new hardware updates and new country support at this point, and seemed to be in danger of going out of business for a while, but so far it's still there. You can always hook up something like Dropbox to back up work in progress.
You use it for gaming? What was the input lag like for the Witcher 3? I imagine you wouldn't be able to play certain genres of games (like online FPS games for example) due to high latency.
That's what Citrix were doing in the enterprise space back in the 1990s. And yes, it felt like magic back then, but it was expensive as hell. I think that's the reason it didn't become "mega" successful. The technology itself was great. I'd demo it to management, they'd get how it made my job easier and allow people to work remotely, but the $$ investment in licenses and servers would immediately shut the conversation down. They'd use it in certain places, like if they had a very old / very new / very hard to configure app, they could just stream it into regular Windows NT machines. They weren't brave enough to shift desktop budget to thin clients and repurpose the aging desktop fleet into dumb Linux terminals. (And actually, the whole Microsoft Client Licence made that almost as expensive as running Windows clients).
Some companies dipped their toes in the water, but I never found a single company that went all-in.
In 2010ish I worked briefly in a school in the UK (ages 11-19) which had 3 or 4 racks of servers running Citrix XenApp, serving Office etc. and general educational and administrative applications to ancient laptops and desktops which had been (very inexpertly) reconfigured as thin clients.
It ran like crap (probably didn't help that re-provisioning a server was defined as hot-swapping disks around and running NewSID or whatever it was called) and of course in large parts of the school the WiFi just wasn't quite good enough. I got a lot of calls from PE teachers trying to take the register from the far corner of the playing field.
It was an extreme case of CV-driven development, I was brought in to backfill when the IT manager who had introduced all this walked out one day. He stood up at about lunchtime, grabbed his coat and said "I'm going now". The team thought he meant for lunch...
By the time I was leaving under a year later, they had brought in another IT manager who (rightly!) said "what's all this nonsense" and rolled out proper clients imaged with MDT.
AWS Workspaces got big during the pandemic. I know atleast one mega consultancy corp which rolled out like 20k workspace instances when their employees moved to WFH.
First thing I thought of was Sun Rays and the magic of taking your smartcard around with you and wherever you say down your desktop would follow you around. Magic!
Ah yes. Sun. A wonderful company. It was like knowing a guy who could write poetry in 15 languages, perform magic tricks, breakdance, recite Pi to a thousand digits, solve a rubix cube in 3s and yet couldn't find a job.
I worked with those guys on a large project. They were amazing. I loved their Sun Rays. But if you spoke to other people in the IT community they generally never heard about their tech. "Uh. Don't they sell servers that don't run Windows?"
I'm working with a number of clients that are doing this. Either an outsourced vmware horizon deployment or Windows Virtual Desktop. Local hardware is only thin clients. No servers in-house, no desktops, no laptops. It isn't as good as local hardware, but it's good enough for most business applications and even video conferencing.
Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).