7 ms·

You could use EC2 but Geforce Now has left beta and announced pricing and it is much cheaper at $5/month. Doing this on-premise is also pretty tantalizing - I

You could use EC2 but Geforce Now has left beta and announced pricing and it is much cheaper at $5/month. Doing this on-premise is also pretty tantalizing - I watched a video recently of Linus Tech Tips where he built a 64 core Threadripper and used virtual machines to replace four physical computers in his home including two players simultaneously gaming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvzeZCZluJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvzeZCZluJ0

gruez 7y ago
>Doing this on-premise is also pretty tantalizing - I watched a video recently of Linus Tech Tips where he built a 64 core Threadripper and used virtual machines to replace four physical computers in his home including two players simultaneously gaming. so basically a mainframe? I can't imagine it's economically viable though. a 64 core threadripper costs more than eight ryzen 3700x and clocks lower.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > and clocks lower And that's the core problem, isn't it? Aren't games notorious for being mostly sequential workloads?
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    > the core problem I see what you did there.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    I'd be interested to know if this has changed recently - the Xbox One and PS4 are both 1.6GHz/1.75GHz 8-core machines.
    - p1necone 7y ago
      When you're designing for that known console configuration you probably make use of the extra cores if you need it. And the really cpu intensive genres (strategy games mostly) don't tend to get console releases. As 4 core/8 thread machines become basically the minimum you can assume most pc gamers will have we'll probably see devs making more use of multithreading everywhere.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    There's no reason they have to be. Game development is slowly but surely migrating toward fully capitalizing on high core/thread counts.
- gravypod 7y ago
  If you live with 2 or 3 other SWEs this is an attractive option. You have enough PCIe lanes to pack in 4 GPUs. You have enough spare horse power to also host basic home services like a file server, gitlab instance, home automation stuff, vpn, etc. I think personally I'd opt for building four or five separate machines and managing them as a cluster though.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > If you live with 2 or 3 other SWEs this is an attractive option. In some sort of software engineering commune?
    - gravypod 7y ago
      I've heard of a few people living like this, especially in areas with very high rent. I'm assuming it's not extremely uncommon and it doesn't sound like the worst way to live.
      - p1necone 7y ago
        Are people really this unfamiliar with the idea of having roommates? I'm 26 and it's been a necessity for my entire post living in parents house life. I could buy a house in the city I currently live in, but I'd be spending >50% of my (relatively large) income on mortgage repayments and I'd be utterly screwed if I ever hit the "housing prices crash" + "no job" combo.
        gravypod 7y ago
        I think it's more common now among tech employees. It's also probably less common in areas with cheaper housing. Personally I feel this kind of shared housing situation would probably be much more enjoyable than loving alone.
        p1necone 7y ago
        It's been great for me. But it heavily relies on the people you're living with being generally reasonable. I've also found it fun to live with people with varying interests, living with just other software engineers might be boring. Common hobbies are great though. Imagine every night being a lan party.
- benologist 7y ago
  I don't even know what his build ran at in total, but he had $1700 (x2!) USB repeaters using fiber optic to directly connect USB peripherals all through his house, half a terabyte of ram and 4 GPUS. I think you could build a lesser machine to cover most household computing needs. I don't think the core speed would matter much - Steam reports 37% of gamers are using 3ghz-and-below processors so they may be mediocre but still competent: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/
- Havoc 7y ago
  >I can't imagine it's economically viable though Well he also built a 6 PC watercooling loop, so yeah not all of it is particularly applicable to the average viewer
  - jrockway 7y ago
    The full-room water cooling was one of my favorite LTT projects. It might be inapplicable to most users but it was a pretty good idea. (If I remember correctly it had a lot of problems and never really worked, but I appreciate someone trying it out.)
    - bangboombang 7y ago
      Same here. That's usually the kind of videos I watch, cause I'm not that interested in seeing benchmarks of the latest RGB memory sticks, or any other memory sticks, GFX cards, headphones for that matter. When I saw his LAN gaming center I though it would be cool if he'd retry that project for that. :->
      - dwild 7y ago
        > I'm not that interested in seeing benchmarks of the latest RGB memory sticks, With the kind of workshop they are building with Alex, it's clear they are aware of that. Let just hope they can do more of them quicker!
- willis936 7y ago
  The CPUs alone are cheaper, yes, but there is room for savings in hardware consolidation. Only one PSU, one case, etc. The effect may be small compared to peripherals and adds inconvenience by tying multiple user experiences to a single point of failure, but it’s still a neat idea.
- jvranish42 7y ago
  Inspired by Linus Tech Tips and bummed that the new threadrippers were out of my budget, I decided to build a 4 gamers 1 CPU box based on a Ryzen 3900X. I used the Ryzen 3900X (12 core) and a x570 Taichi, and then 4 GPUs (in the Nivida 1060 to 1660 range) (I had to use one of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YDH8KW9 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YDH8KW9 to connect my 4th GPU to one of the m.2 slots) My total cost was somewhere in the $2400 range. I personal think it's a super awesome setup, but it's _definitely not_ for the faint of heart. You have to _really enjoy_ debugging crazy shit for it to be worth it. But even at my "budget" $2400 range, a $20/month for 4 users of some game streaming service, would buy me about _ten years_ for that price. The economics of a streaming service are really quite killer.
  - MrGilbert 7y ago
    Which OS do you use as a host? What I really dislike about my setup is the dedicated gpu I need just for the BIOS to post. //Edit: Using a Ryzen 5 2600 and a Gigabyte X470 Auros Ultra Gaming
    - throwaway9d0291 7y ago
      I'm using Linux and configured the kernel to basically entirely disown the GPU from the very start (blacklisted kernel modules, disabled framebuffer). After that, I'm able to passthrough the GPU to a VM.
      - MrGilbert 7y ago
        Thanks for the hint - I always thought it's the bios grabbing the gpu, and not releasing it again for the vm. I might need to read into some stuff.
    - jvranish42 7y ago
      I'm using Unraid, (a linux), which uses kvm for the virtualization. If you're using kvm, you can passthrough your primary GPU by dumping the vbios, and then passing that along when you initiate the passthrough. Passing a custom vbios is pretty easy to do in Unraid, though dumping the vbios is still a manual process. I have do that in my setup because I don't have any spare slots for another GPU, even a tiny one.
- ansible 7y ago
  "Economically viable" isn't very glamorous these days. Or difficult. You can pick up a used i5-3xxx or 4xxx system with 8GB of RAM real cheap. If you get one that has at least a 300W power supply, you can then put in a GTX 1660 or similar and do quite well with most games. Max settings @ 1080p for some older games, and still decently playable at decent quality for the newer ones. And all for $300 USD or less. I just put an RX 580 with 8GB of video RAM into my old i5-3570S system. The card was just $135 at Microcenter, because it was open-box.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > The card was just $135 at Microcenter, because it was open-box. Even then you'll need 27 months (2 years and 3 months) before being more cost effective than Geforce Now. That's considering that you are on a desktop though with a CPU powerful enough. Personally I started doing cloud gaming mostly because I was on a netbook at school (I liked the form factor and the battery life was quite nice versus most laptop). At first on OnLive, then on LiquidSky, and since a year ago, on Geforce Now. I don't believe the service will stay at 5$/month though, both service I used shutdown because they weren't viable and they were in the 10$ range. LiquidSky was supposed to come back, but they missed multiple release date now and with the release of GeForce Now, I have no hope. Shadow seems more viable at 25$/month, which makes your solution much more cost effective.
    - ansible 7y ago
      Shadow recently dropped their price to $13 USD a month for a year contract. The $34 USD / month for month-to-month is still pretty steep.
- throwaway9d0291 7y ago
  Linus's setup doesn't make much sense economically but the concept works. You don't have to go to the extreme end of available CPUs. 64-cores for 4 machines = 16 cores per machine, which is overkill, especially for gaming. If you go for a 12 or 16 core Threadripper like the 2920X or 2950X you're only looking at $425/$690, which is $106/$173 per "PC". Combine that with the savings you get from not having to buy 4 cases, PSUs and motherboards and I think a multi-head threadripper setup will end up significantly cheaper than buying 4 machines.
arendtio 7y ago
Still now Linux client with Geforce Now. I wonder if using Wireguard could improve the performance of a custom solution.
- boxerbk 7y ago
  We have a Linux client on Parsec (https://parsecgaming.com/downloads https://parsecgaming.com/downloads). You can install Parsec on any gaming machine (PC or VM) and use our game streaming software to play from your Linux machine
Aperocky 7y ago
That's fun but not particularly realistic for most. The direction we're going in is massive parallel computing, not massive chips. Threadripper represent the pinnacle of individual chips but I'd imagine having 4 boxes that are each 3800X + 1GPU + 128 GB ram would be cheaper and easier to maintain both hardware and software wise? Except it wouldn't sound as fun.
girvo 7y ago
Sadly GeForce Now doesn't exist in Australia yet, while EC2 does -- though I bit the bullet and bought a Razer Core X external GPU enclosure instead after using streaming services (specifically Parsec) for years.
McAtNite 7y ago
I’ve actually sort of done this exact thing on premise. I run a full VMware setup at my house with networked storage. I’m currently just running some Ryzen 2700s for the hosts with plenty of ram for each, but I did decide to just buy a graphics card and pass it through to a windows VM. I then bought a dummy HDMI plug, and installed some open source software called Moonlight on my Mac and Linux systems. I can stream my games locally no problem from my VM. Eventually I want to get wireguard set up, and test performance over VPN, but I really haven’t had a reason to try it just yet.
- jon-wood 7y ago
  You might want to check out Parsec, which in my experience is much smoother than Moonlight was.
jsgo 7y ago
The one thing that is preventing me from going the virtualized route: peripherals. Shadow has it where you can use USB peripherals connected to your device locked to the VM, but for the life of me, I can’t get HORI’s firmware update for the Assault Commander FFXIV mini keyboard (I have an orb weaver chroma too, but I really like the stick placement on the HORI) to properly work. Haven’t even tried the mapping software yet. If I can figure that out, may be in love.
saber6 7y ago
I tried GeForce now. Maybe it’s because I am a fairly heavy casual FPS gamer, but the input lag was very noticeable. Neat concept and I hope it can get better!
- metadaemon 7y ago
  Did you pay for priority access, or was this with the free version?
  - saber6 7y ago
    Yeah it was priority. 90 days free trial.
chatmasta 7y ago
GeForce Now is fantastic. I'm not a serious enough gamer to warrant buying a PC, and I do all my work on my MacBook Air 2013. It's pretty cool to boot up a GeForce instance and get to use all the resource intensive games (games like Civ, Cities Skylines) without my computer frying my legs off. I tried a round of FPS with it. It wasn't that bad, honestly. My ping to the GeForce server was about 12ms, and the ping from GeForce to the game server was < 2ms. That's actually lower latency than I'm used to with an Xbox. It did feel a bit laggy, though, despite the low latency. But I'd try it again. For me the benefit is in resource-intensive single player games. Either way, for $5 a month, it's a great deal!

gruez 7y ago

>Doing this on-premise is also pretty tantalizing - I watched a video recently of Linus Tech Tips where he built a 64 core Threadripper and used virtual machines to replace four physical computers in his home including two players simultaneously gaming. so basically a mainframe? I can't imagine it's economically viable though. a 64 core threadripper costs more than eight ryzen 3700x and clocks lower.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> and clocks lower And that's the core problem, isn't it? Aren't games notorious for being mostly sequential workloads?
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  > the core problem I see what you did there.
- stordoff 7y ago
  I'd be interested to know if this has changed recently - the Xbox One and PS4 are both 1.6GHz/1.75GHz 8-core machines.
  - p1necone 7y ago
    When you're designing for that known console configuration you probably make use of the extra cores if you need it. And the really cpu intensive genres (strategy games mostly) don't tend to get console releases. As 4 core/8 thread machines become basically the minimum you can assume most pc gamers will have we'll probably see devs making more use of multithreading everywhere.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  There's no reason they have to be. Game development is slowly but surely migrating toward fully capitalizing on high core/thread counts.
gravypod 7y ago
If you live with 2 or 3 other SWEs this is an attractive option. You have enough PCIe lanes to pack in 4 GPUs. You have enough spare horse power to also host basic home services like a file server, gitlab instance, home automation stuff, vpn, etc. I think personally I'd opt for building four or five separate machines and managing them as a cluster though.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > If you live with 2 or 3 other SWEs this is an attractive option. In some sort of software engineering commune?
  - gravypod 7y ago
    I've heard of a few people living like this, especially in areas with very high rent. I'm assuming it's not extremely uncommon and it doesn't sound like the worst way to live.
    - p1necone 7y ago
      Are people really this unfamiliar with the idea of having roommates? I'm 26 and it's been a necessity for my entire post living in parents house life. I could buy a house in the city I currently live in, but I'd be spending >50% of my (relatively large) income on mortgage repayments and I'd be utterly screwed if I ever hit the "housing prices crash" + "no job" combo.
      - gravypod 7y ago
        I think it's more common now among tech employees. It's also probably less common in areas with cheaper housing. Personally I feel this kind of shared housing situation would probably be much more enjoyable than loving alone.
        p1necone 7y ago
        It's been great for me. But it heavily relies on the people you're living with being generally reasonable. I've also found it fun to live with people with varying interests, living with just other software engineers might be boring. Common hobbies are great though. Imagine every night being a lan party.
benologist 7y ago
I don't even know what his build ran at in total, but he had $1700 (x2!) USB repeaters using fiber optic to directly connect USB peripherals all through his house, half a terabyte of ram and 4 GPUS. I think you could build a lesser machine to cover most household computing needs. I don't think the core speed would matter much - Steam reports 37% of gamers are using 3ghz-and-below processors so they may be mediocre but still competent: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/
Havoc 7y ago
>I can't imagine it's economically viable though Well he also built a 6 PC watercooling loop, so yeah not all of it is particularly applicable to the average viewer
- jrockway 7y ago
  The full-room water cooling was one of my favorite LTT projects. It might be inapplicable to most users but it was a pretty good idea. (If I remember correctly it had a lot of problems and never really worked, but I appreciate someone trying it out.)
  - bangboombang 7y ago
    Same here. That's usually the kind of videos I watch, cause I'm not that interested in seeing benchmarks of the latest RGB memory sticks, or any other memory sticks, GFX cards, headphones for that matter. When I saw his LAN gaming center I though it would be cool if he'd retry that project for that. :->
    - dwild 7y ago
      > I'm not that interested in seeing benchmarks of the latest RGB memory sticks, With the kind of workshop they are building with Alex, it's clear they are aware of that. Let just hope they can do more of them quicker!
willis936 7y ago
The CPUs alone are cheaper, yes, but there is room for savings in hardware consolidation. Only one PSU, one case, etc. The effect may be small compared to peripherals and adds inconvenience by tying multiple user experiences to a single point of failure, but it’s still a neat idea.
jvranish42 7y ago
Inspired by Linus Tech Tips and bummed that the new threadrippers were out of my budget, I decided to build a 4 gamers 1 CPU box based on a Ryzen 3900X. I used the Ryzen 3900X (12 core) and a x570 Taichi, and then 4 GPUs (in the Nivida 1060 to 1660 range) (I had to use one of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YDH8KW9 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YDH8KW9 to connect my 4th GPU to one of the m.2 slots) My total cost was somewhere in the $2400 range. I personal think it's a super awesome setup, but it's _definitely not_ for the faint of heart. You have to _really enjoy_ debugging crazy shit for it to be worth it. But even at my "budget" $2400 range, a $20/month for 4 users of some game streaming service, would buy me about _ten years_ for that price. The economics of a streaming service are really quite killer.
- MrGilbert 7y ago
  Which OS do you use as a host? What I really dislike about my setup is the dedicated gpu I need just for the BIOS to post. //Edit: Using a Ryzen 5 2600 and a Gigabyte X470 Auros Ultra Gaming
  - throwaway9d0291 7y ago
    I'm using Linux and configured the kernel to basically entirely disown the GPU from the very start (blacklisted kernel modules, disabled framebuffer). After that, I'm able to passthrough the GPU to a VM.
    - MrGilbert 7y ago
      Thanks for the hint - I always thought it's the bios grabbing the gpu, and not releasing it again for the vm. I might need to read into some stuff.
  - jvranish42 7y ago
    I'm using Unraid, (a linux), which uses kvm for the virtualization. If you're using kvm, you can passthrough your primary GPU by dumping the vbios, and then passing that along when you initiate the passthrough. Passing a custom vbios is pretty easy to do in Unraid, though dumping the vbios is still a manual process. I have do that in my setup because I don't have any spare slots for another GPU, even a tiny one.
ansible 7y ago
"Economically viable" isn't very glamorous these days. Or difficult. You can pick up a used i5-3xxx or 4xxx system with 8GB of RAM real cheap. If you get one that has at least a 300W power supply, you can then put in a GTX 1660 or similar and do quite well with most games. Max settings @ 1080p for some older games, and still decently playable at decent quality for the newer ones. And all for $300 USD or less. I just put an RX 580 with 8GB of video RAM into my old i5-3570S system. The card was just $135 at Microcenter, because it was open-box.
- dwild 7y ago
  > The card was just $135 at Microcenter, because it was open-box. Even then you'll need 27 months (2 years and 3 months) before being more cost effective than Geforce Now. That's considering that you are on a desktop though with a CPU powerful enough. Personally I started doing cloud gaming mostly because I was on a netbook at school (I liked the form factor and the battery life was quite nice versus most laptop). At first on OnLive, then on LiquidSky, and since a year ago, on Geforce Now. I don't believe the service will stay at 5$/month though, both service I used shutdown because they weren't viable and they were in the 10$ range. LiquidSky was supposed to come back, but they missed multiple release date now and with the release of GeForce Now, I have no hope. Shadow seems more viable at 25$/month, which makes your solution much more cost effective.
  - ansible 7y ago
    Shadow recently dropped their price to $13 USD a month for a year contract. The $34 USD / month for month-to-month is still pretty steep.
throwaway9d0291 7y ago
Linus's setup doesn't make much sense economically but the concept works. You don't have to go to the extreme end of available CPUs. 64-cores for 4 machines = 16 cores per machine, which is overkill, especially for gaming. If you go for a 12 or 16 core Threadripper like the 2920X or 2950X you're only looking at $425/$690, which is $106/$173 per "PC". Combine that with the savings you get from not having to buy 4 cases, PSUs and motherboards and I think a multi-head threadripper setup will end up significantly cheaper than buying 4 machines.

arendtio 7y ago

Still now Linux client with Geforce Now. I wonder if using Wireguard could improve the performance of a custom solution.

boxerbk 7y ago
We have a Linux client on Parsec (https://parsecgaming.com/downloads https://parsecgaming.com/downloads). You can install Parsec on any gaming machine (PC or VM) and use our game streaming software to play from your Linux machine

Aperocky 7y ago

That's fun but not particularly realistic for most. The direction we're going in is massive parallel computing, not massive chips. Threadripper represent the pinnacle of individual chips but I'd imagine having 4 boxes that are each 3800X + 1GPU + 128 GB ram would be cheaper and easier to maintain both hardware and software wise? Except it wouldn't sound as fun.

girvo 7y ago

Sadly GeForce Now doesn't exist in Australia yet, while EC2 does -- though I bit the bullet and bought a Razer Core X external GPU enclosure instead after using streaming services (specifically Parsec) for years.

McAtNite 7y ago

I’ve actually sort of done this exact thing on premise. I run a full VMware setup at my house with networked storage. I’m currently just running some Ryzen 2700s for the hosts with plenty of ram for each, but I did decide to just buy a graphics card and pass it through to a windows VM. I then bought a dummy HDMI plug, and installed some open source software called Moonlight on my Mac and Linux systems. I can stream my games locally no problem from my VM. Eventually I want to get wireguard set up, and test performance over VPN, but I really haven’t had a reason to try it just yet.

jon-wood 7y ago
You might want to check out Parsec, which in my experience is much smoother than Moonlight was.

jsgo 7y ago

The one thing that is preventing me from going the virtualized route: peripherals. Shadow has it where you can use USB peripherals connected to your device locked to the VM, but for the life of me, I can’t get HORI’s firmware update for the Assault Commander FFXIV mini keyboard (I have an orb weaver chroma too, but I really like the stick placement on the HORI) to properly work. Haven’t even tried the mapping software yet. If I can figure that out, may be in love.

saber6 7y ago

I tried GeForce now. Maybe it’s because I am a fairly heavy casual FPS gamer, but the input lag was very noticeable. Neat concept and I hope it can get better!

metadaemon 7y ago
Did you pay for priority access, or was this with the free version?
- saber6 7y ago
  Yeah it was priority. 90 days free trial.

chatmasta 7y ago

GeForce Now is fantastic. I'm not a serious enough gamer to warrant buying a PC, and I do all my work on my MacBook Air 2013. It's pretty cool to boot up a GeForce instance and get to use all the resource intensive games (games like Civ, Cities Skylines) without my computer frying my legs off. I tried a round of FPS with it. It wasn't that bad, honestly. My ping to the GeForce server was about 12ms, and the ping from GeForce to the game server was < 2ms. That's actually lower latency than I'm used to with an Xbox. It did feel a bit laggy, though, despite the low latency. But I'd try it again. For me the benefit is in resource-intensive single player games. Either way, for $5 a month, it's a great deal!