Gamung Server

[MikeyBates]

I'm planning to replace my wife and my PCs soon, and I was wondering if it would be a good idea to build a very powerful gaming server with a lot of GPU power, then 2 more moderate desktops (or laptops) that use the server hardware to play games. 

 

Had anyone played on a setup like this, was it a good playing experience, or would it be better to put together 2 gaming desktops instead.

[grimreeper132]

by gaming server do you mean a server which runs the server which everyone joins into, if so far as I remember that uses more CPU horses than GPU ones, and it's the PCs connecting to said server which uses the GPU horses. If your streaming the game from the server onto your PCs and want one rig for gaming (like 2 gamers 1 CPU) then don't it's a horrible idea, it adds too many issues, and 1 computer each is cheaper and better.

[sazrocks]

As a server that hosts game servers, the GPU could almost literally be a potato. CPU power and RAM are what matter. 

[jkirkcaldy]

Should be possible in theory. But I think you would be better served by making the gaming servers individual machines that are hidden away in a (well ventalated) rack or cupboard then use Steam streaming or something similar to play the games on lower powered machines. These machines don't need to be very powerful at all. Just need a semi-decent cpu (like a fairly recent i3 should be fine) as it only needs to decode the h264 stream from steam. 

 

I will be looking into virtualising a gaming pc though. I have a gaming pc and two of my flatmates have a gaming pc but there is my gf and another friend who both own macs so can't really join in. So my plan is to create a fairly able gaming vm so they could stream the games from the server to their macs to join in on games like ark and maybe another coulple of games that don't depend too much on low latency. 

 

Use what you have now, install a hypervisor and test to see how and if you can get gpu passthrough working and what the perfomance is like, then you can see whether or not that was a massive PITA or if it's worth the effort to achieve what you want. 

[Pixel5]

Will not work or be practical at all, get two decent PC´s for you and be done with it.

 

It is possible in theory but only as shown in the 7 games one CPU video from linus, not really via Lan or wifi.