Moonlight Streaming Performance with Samsung Tab A9 + Mini Review
I have lately developed an interest in game streaming. I had already used Geforce Now for a long time when it first came out until I got my new desktop PC, but now I’m exploring local game streaming as well. I started using it with my phone, S23+, and it’s almost a flawless experience when coupled with a GameSir G8+ gamepad.
But soon enough, I was not satisfied with the screen size of my phone and wanted to upgrade to a tablet.
Turns out 8-9 inch tablets are quite a small market. iPad Mini is the most popular option, but I felt that it was overkill for a workload that is basically playing video. I wanted to find something cheaper.
Then I discovered Samsung Tab A9. As far as I can tell it is one of the cheapest mini tablets in the market from known brands. It was the cheapest that I could find, but the streaming experience did not really go as planned.
The price
Let’s start with the good.
First, the price. A9 is priced at around €200-220, but as far as I can see it’s almost always on sale somewhere, usually at around €150-160. Moreover, I believe Samsung must have given this tablet as a promotion with their expensive mobiles at one point because I keep seeing this tablet being sold in second-hand marketplaces unopened and unused. That’s exactly how I bought it, and I paid around €100. There were 2 more unopened listings at the same time around the same price. There were also some A9+s as well - which is a better tablet - but it was too big for my purpose.
Daily use
When it comes to navigating the menus, opening/closing apps, using the browser etc., I was really shocked at how laggy A9 was. When I first set up the tablet, I could not believe that Samsung actually allowed this to be sold under its brand. However, things have changed later. Turns out the lag was caused by the installation processes happening in the background for the initial launch. Once I let it run for 15-20 minutes, and then upgraded the Android version from 13 to 15, it got surprisingly stable and smooth. To set the expectations correctly, we’re not talking about an iPad level smoothness here. This is still a very low powered tablet. But I can say it becomes quite usable for daily browsing, watching YouTube, checking e-mails, etc., after the initial installation process and the software updates.
The resolution trick
Okay, this one is weird. A9 has a display with 1340 x 800 resolution. and that is… not great. You can see on Reddit that a lot of people are complaining about how shitty the display is. I personally did not think the colors and the brightness was horrible, but the icons and the text had some serious anti-aliasing issues due to low resolution.
However, a person with the nickname of nunits on XDA Forums has discovered that the device actually has a higher resolution display and it’s just limited by software. After running the command here, and increasing the resolution to 1080p, the display got visibly better. I am still not sure if this actually shows 1080p, or if it just renders 1080p and downscales to 800p, but either way it improves the quality significantly.
Streaming with Moonlight
Let’s finally talk about my real use case with the tablet - local game streaming.
Network Delay
This one was similar to the lag in the menus. At first, the network delay was at the very least 50 ms, which basically means unplayable. I thought this was due to a weaker Wi-Fi chipset or something, but this was also fixed with the updates. After running the tablet for a while and making the software updates, the network delay reduced to around 10 ms. For reference, this is still higher than what I get with my phone, which is around 6-7ms, but it’s not that big of a difference.
Decoding Time
This is the real problem. Despite testing all the settings in Moonlight (Well, actually Apollo and Artemis.) the lowest decoding time I could achieve was fluctuating between 15ms to 20ms and that is only if I lower the resolution to 800p. With 1080p, it decoding time is around 25-26ms. Coupled with the 10ms network delay, 800p delay is not completely unplayable, but it’s not a pleasant experience, either. For instance, you could comfortably play something like XCOM, or Slay The Spire that are more tolerant to delay, but anything real-time is not comfortable. Especially considering that the visual quality is not the greatest at 800p either, I would actually prefer to play on the small screen of my phone.
Overall, unless you already have this tablet, I definitely do not recommend getting Samsung Tab A9 for game streaming. In fact, I later found out that MediaTek is notorious for poor decoding times.
On the other hand, I actually found it to be a good value for light media and browsing usage. For instance, if you need the absolute minimum device to watch YouTube when cooking in the kitchen, this might be a great option.