Multiple concurrent game on windows

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muadib

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I am totally ignorant about windows, and I've been asked to build a sort of game console.

There will be one main headless server, running linux, with one or more GPUs, with windows virtualized inside QEMU-KVM.

Windows will run headless, and steam streaming / nvidia gamestream will be used to play the games. PCI passthrough will be enabled, so windows will have full control over the GPU.

Now I have three options:

1) Virtualize the gpu and run multiple windows instance. Very poor performance and inability to run newer games lead me to discard this.

2) Run multiple instance of windows, one for each concurrent user. This will need one discrete GPU per user, making it very expensive.

3) Run one instance of windows, with multiple concurrent user each sharing one powerful GPU. This is the preferred solution.

Is it possible under Windows to run multiple games in multiple different sessions at once, and stream them using gamestream or (multiple account of) steam?

What windows version should I use?

Could I use the RDP wrapper library to enable multiple concurrent sessions, each running and streaming a game?
 
That's an interesting question.

I'm going to focus on question 3. I hadn't thought about it much until now, but after having a think and a quick look into, I suspect you could likely do this style of setup with Windows Server 2016.
This isn't quite answering your question, but it's got some useful info in the thread comments:

I'm having issues inserting this URL - so do a google query for an message thread on reddit called "Windows Server 2016 is amazing for gaming"

re: RDP - quite possibly, but I would test it before assuming everything works flawlessly. I also suspect Citrix Server would be a interesting method to test too - using the its support for GPU acceleration and the ICA protocol often performs better than RDP in a lot of enterprise environments (from a performance angle and it depends on what we're talking about specifically).

The bottom line being I think question 3 is likely doable. I haven't done it myself though or seriously thought about it - but if I were you, I would get an evaluation copy of Server 2016 and do some real world testing. You may find it all works happily, or you may find you run into some serious issues - but single player gaming on Server OS'es is easily done - it's just your specific scenario is a little more complex and demanding that a single user situation.

Don't expect the answer to get handed to you though - as it's not going to be a common scenario.
It's highly likely you'll need to do some learning and then roll up your sleeves and test things out yourself.

I assume you're aware though that real world performance in the games is going to be significantly effected by the underlying GPU hardware being shared across multiple users. You may need to reset your performance expectations - depending on exactly what you're planning on running and how many concurrent users.

...there's only one way to find out though :)
 
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I just read about a new NVidia card that is used for this very thing for virtualized gaming server people can rent. Can't remember the name but I'm sure you can Google it.
 
While I can't stand the guy, wasn't there a YouTube video on Linus Tech Tips where he did this exact thing?
 
Archaea said:
Here's a recipe
7 Gamers, 1 CPU - Ultimate Virtualized Gaming Build Log
You could do this much cheaper with a bit older off lease multi CPU Xeon system off eBay.
Click to expand...

Exactly the kind of thing I was thinking. It's definitely not a cheap setup for multi-player though, but it's definitely very do-able :)

To clarify though, the method being used in this video is running multiple concurrent VMs on top of the hardware, with a user in each - which is a neat, simple, easy to manage approach.
I do think you could also do this natively within Windows 2016 Server, with multiple users logging into the same OS on the same hardware.

The second of those two methods though is going to be harder to setup and I'm not sure (without real world testing) which approach would give you the best experience, in terms of in game performance etc.
 
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How many do you need. This kind of off lease server would be good for 3 full fledged hosts

http://vi.raptor.ebaydesc.com/ws/eB...491124&category=179&pm=1&ds=0&t=1475109712883

Dual hex core xeons at 3.6Ghz. 48GB of RAM. It has a 1,100 watt silver certified power supply standard in the Dell T7500 so plenty of power avail.

It has room for three full size pci-e 16x cards. Drop in three 1060 cards or three RX480 cards and you'd have a working system like discussed for just over $1k. That's plenty for pretty much very high or max settings on any game at 1080p.

Each host could have access to four cores of a Xeon and ~16GB RAM and whatever video card you install.
 
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muz_j said:
I assume you're aware though that real world performance in the games is going to be significantly effected by the underlying GPU hardware being shared across multiple users. You may need to reset your performance expectations - depending on exactly what you're planning on running and how many concurrent users.

...there's only one way to find out though :)
Click to expand...

I was hoping to throttle resources on a per process basis. Like CPU, ram, etc... Do you have any tips on that?

Plus does windows allows multiple concurrent users to have multiple concurrent session? I heard that launching one D3D game prevented other users from accessing mouse / keyboard


muz_j said:
Cloud Gaming – Gaming as a Service (GaaS) | NVIDIA GRID | NVIDIA
I believe you're referring to NVidia's GRID technology?

GRID GPUs:
Specs & Features of GRID Cloud Gaming GPUs | NVIDIA
Click to expand...

Nvidia GRID cards are very expensive, 2000$+ for second hand card. They are out of budget, and the Grid software support is poor / incomplete.
 
Right - which is why I linked to the ebay deal - which would be ridiculously cheaper for a small performance hit.
also saw this in the classified here this morning which is even better - has dual 8 core processors with hyperthreading so it would be 32 threads.
FS - Dual E5-2670 Server, 2x HTPCs, Intel NUC
 
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