In home Game streaming without dedicated monitor

[sowmendipta]

So I have a workstation with GTX 1080 Ti, Threadripper 1950X, 32 GB RAM and 1TB Nvme SSD running Windows 10. I want to stream games from this workstation to my laptop connected to the local network. I can do this with Steam In home streaming or Rainway. But the problem is this makes the workstation useless as it runs the game on the monitor and cannot be used for any other work. Is there a way to stream games in the background or without displaying game and audio to the monitor so that someone else can use the worksation at the same time to do some browsing or maybe watch a movie?

[manikyath]

is there a way? most likely yes.

easy to implement and publicly available? hell no.

 

the way all in-home streaming services i'm aware of work, is by capturing the screen or game window, sending that to the client, and forwarding the button inputs back to the main system.

to do what you want, you'd have to modify the game to output directly to the capture system, and have the controller commands input directly into the game.

 

in other words, custom software, most likely modifications to the games, etc..

[Senzelian]

You could do that with a hypervisor, a couple of VMs, PCI-e passthrough, an additional graphics cards and a headless HDMI adapter.

That's the only way I can think of.

 

So basically what Linus did with 7 Gamers, 1 CPU , but instead only have 2 VMs and have one of them run your game streaming.

[Tika]

54 minutes ago, sowmendipta said:

So I have a workstation with GTX 1080 Ti, Threadripper 1950X, 32 GB RAM and 1TB Nvme SSD running Windows 10. I want to stream games from this workstation to my laptop connected to the local network. I can do this with Steam In home streaming or Rainway. But the problem is this makes the workstation useless as it runs the game on the monitor and cannot be used for any other work. Is there a way to stream games in the background or without displaying game and audio to the monitor so that someone else can use the worksation at the same time to do some browsing or maybe watch a movie?

The way to do without VMs would be to use a cheap 1080p capture card from eBay and set the games to show only on that "monitor".

[Tika]

Just now, Tika said:

The way to do without VMs would be to use a cheap 1080p capture card from eBay and set the games to show only on that "monitor".

Nvm I misunderstood, this won't really work unless you aren't using the PC anyways...