Two Towers, One Gaming Rig...

[AnhydrousElite]

In an LTT video posted way back in 2015, probably iterated on since then; there was a video where Linus demonstrated a Single Tower two Gaming Rig setup. 

I am here wondering if I can divide the workload of running a particular game across two different Windows 10 computers?  

 

I can dream?

 

--AnhydrousElite

[GoldenLag]

You can sort of do it. But its not in the way you think.

 

It woulf be more like Game streaming.

[Spotty]

18 minutes ago, AnhydrousElite said:

I am here wondering if I can divide the workload of running a particular game across two different Windows 10 computers?  

Nope.
Assuming you don't count game streaming services which are more having one remote system do the work and the other just display the output rather than combining the processing power of the two.

There are things such as SLI/Crossfire where you can use multiple graphics cards in one system, however there are some caveats and generally speaking it's not worth it these days. To a lesser extent there's also using a 2nd Nvidia graphics card for PhysX, however the use of dedicated PhysX card never really took off and is useless these days with more powerful graphics cards and few titles supporting PhysX.

It's also not uncommon for professional game streamers to use multiple PCs - 1 for playing on and the 2nd PC for capturing the display output and encoding it for the stream/recording. They do this as high bitrate, high quality streaming can require significant CPU resources, which may affect their gaming performance if it's done on the gaming machine. This requires the use of hardware capture cards to accept and process the display from the first PC. Not required for anyone who isn't doing it professionally.

 

Realistically speaking if you have two computers sitting around and you aren't happy with the gaming performance and want to combine them in to one PC to improve gaming performance, you'd probably get the biggest performance boost by selling one of the PCs and using the funds to upgrade the other (or selling both and using the money to buy new parts).

[Mbowen]

You're actually not the first person to ask this. You could setup a cluster to try and divide the processing between the computers. It's pretty difficult and I don't think you could limit the machine to WIndows and be successful in your attempt. People have tried though. 

Here's a link from back in 2010

 

Longer answer from a more specific source back in 2006:

"While you can logically have more computer power by buying several computers and linking them together, the software you run on it *must* be specifically written to take advantage of the parallel processing... That's where the gaming part fails."

But a lot has changed in the last 13 years... maybe.

[ZBVirus24]

I actually do think there is a way...

SpaceDesk is a program which allows you to use an old laptop as an extra screen...

But you can also install it on a full on PC and stretch the video across both screens to spread the workload across two GPUs.

(Although, I don't think that it will spread the CPU and/or the RAM workload. Pretty sure it will just be on the main PC - the one which the driver is installed on).

If anyone can try it, I think it's DEFINITELY worth the try (ahmmm ahhm Linus... ahhm ahhmm) (no hints here at all).

[Guest]

You could definitely split the processors over two computer, however this is limited to specific Linux distros and software. Trivially, its one thread per core, so even if you have the extra processing power, it’s only a specific use case where you would need more threads than available on server grade hardware. 

[darth liutas]

yes and no, you can't like split a game on to 2 rigs but you can let a game run on a rig while other stuff run on your other rig, like streaming a video or something like that,but i wonder if you can like split the code of a game into 2 seprate programmes running on 2 rigs and communicating to each other