Multiseat Gaming Questions

xb2003 · November 28, 2017

My friends and I often do Battlefield 2 LAN parties. A lot of us have decent gaming computers, but the game is so old and easy to run that I scrounge together as many PCs as I can find that will run the game. I got to thinking the other day, wouldn't it be nice if I could just get 3-4 of these decent computers to run 4 instances of the game a piece? I mean, in theory I could allocate a core and 2 gigs of RAM and be well within the requirements to run that game (though I know its not that simple). So I stumbled upon Linus talking about his setup and found some software solutions like SoftXpand and Aster. Basically, I'm curious if anything has done something like this with an older game? How well did it work, especially with 4 or more instances? I have a 3470, 8GB and a 970, would I be anywhere close to being able to pull off 4 or more seats off?

Thanks in advance for the help. I'm going to download some trials and see what I can do also, but I thought I'd see if anyone had done something like this.

November 28, 2017

3 minutes ago, xb2003 said:

My friends and I often do Battlefield 2 LAN parties. A lot of us have decent gaming computers, but the game is so old and easy to run that I scrounge together as many PCs as I can find that will run the game. I got to thinking the other day, wouldn't it be nice if I could just get 3-4 of these decent computers to run 4 instances of the game a piece? I mean, in theory I could allocate a core and 2 gigs of RAM and be well within the requirements to run that game (though I know its not that simple). So I stumbled upon Linus talking about his setup and found some software solutions like SoftXpand and Aster. Basically, I'm curious if anything has done something like this with an older game? How well did it work, especially with 4 or more instances? I have a 3470, 8GB and a 970, would I be anywhere close to being able to pull off 4 or more seats off?

Thanks in advance for the help. I'm going to download some trials and see what I can do also, but I thought I'd see if anyone had done something like this.

It might work. It would use every bit of your 8 gigs though.

If you guys like BF2, a really fun game to play with friends is Project Reality. It was a mod of BF2 but got turned into a standalone. It's free and the community is awesome.

LogicalDrm · November 28, 2017

From what I remember from Aster is that you have one system doing number crunching and others as lighter stations. I don't know if any reputable site has tested how well it works for games.

xb2003 · November 28, 2017

29 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

From what I remember from Aster is that you have one system doing number crunching and others as lighter stations. I don't know if any reputable site has tested how well it works for games.

Well I don't know how reputable I am, and I don't know if something as old as BF2 is what you would consider a game, but I have done some testing and so far it's doing exactly what I want.

I successfully ran three instances BF2 1.41, all with the settings maxed (no anti aliasing), 2 monitors at 1920x1440@60 and 1 at 1280x1024@60. I was also running the server as well as a forth monitor which was its own desktop using Aster (on my 3470's integrated graphics) so I could monitor the system. Playability wise, all three instances of BF2 never dropped below 60fps, and the fans on my 970 never even kicked on. lol

Originally with the three instances of the game running, my CPU usage showed 100%. I set each instance to use a different core and then those three cores showed 100% while the forth was basically at idle. The game ran perfectly fine, temperatures got even remotely hot, and the CPU fan didn't spin up, so I'm thinking it wasn't actually taxing the CPU much. I probably need to find a better monitoring solution than Task Manager.

RAM usage was just under 4GB.

I'm going to grab a couple more monitors and throw in my old GTX 660 see how many instances of the game I can run, I can't imagine it would have any issues with 4 or 5.

I have run into a couple of issues. The three monitors running on the 970 like to flicker at certain times, such as on the windows login screen, whenever Windows prompts a user for admin rights, and right when the game is launching. The latter of the three was awful at first, taking 30 seconds to a minute to end it's episode for each instance. But there were no issues once I got all three instances launched, and I never had it fail to launch. Matching the system resolution to the game resolution just about cured that(it blinks like twice now). Uninstalling the 3d vision driver helped with the admin rights prompt, and I set Aster to automatically login, so thats not an issue either(although the 3D vision drivers might have fixed this also, I didn't check).