Any secret sauce Nvidia uses would be in taking shortcuts to capture the screen and send it directly to the encoding timeline. The time it takes to do this without any secret sauce is negligible compared to the two slowest processes in the pipeline: video encoding and sending the data over the internet.
Sunshine is actually often more performant than Nvidia due to improvements in the slower parts of the pipeline.
Any secret sauce Nvidia uses would be in taking shortcuts to capture the screen and send it directly to the encoding timeline. The time it takes to do this without any secret sauce is negligible compared to the two slowest processes in the pipeline: video encoding and sending the data over the internet.
Sunshine is actually often more performant than Nvidia due to improvements in the slower parts of the pipeline.
Here are some discussions on the topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/comments/11da4c1/why_is_sunshine_performance_so_much_better_than/
https://github.com/orgs/LizardByte/discussions/111
Awesome to hear, and thanks for the citations! Much appreciated.