[CPU/Platform upgrade for 3 gaming VMs Unraid set-up]

On 9/1/2020 at 9:53 PM, hrubak said:

Hello guys, 

 

I am thinking of an upgrade of the CPU/Platform as I am currently fairly succesfully running Unraid and 3 gaming VMs at once using my old (but still quite capable :D) Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 ( 10 core/20 threads Ivy Bridge EP) and 32GB of Ram.

 

The GPUs are AMD RX 470 ( VM set as Q35 4.2 due to i440fx is locking up the VM after AMD driver installation) and 2x nVidia GTX 1050Ti (VMs set to i440fx 4.2).

 

I am using HyperV on all the VMs and also some of the tweaks (Performance governor, HyperV XML settings and CPU pinning and isolation).

 

I have assigned 6 threads (hyper-thread pairs) to every VM and left 2 threads (0 and 1) for unraid.

 

I have benched the CPU with 8 threads (Vcpus)  also and for multí-thread I am getting close (give or take 10%) to bare-metal Intel core i7 2600K (which is clocked higher though), so I am thinking that the VM setup is not that bad.

 

 

Given how old the CPU is, it still works quite well (we are targeting 1080/60 fps), however in more demanding multiplayer FPS games (CS:GO for example is hovering from 60-90 fps which is okay), like for example Battlefiled 1, joining the 64 conquest maps make the game run at around 25-40 fps max.

GTA V Multiplayer for example is running around 45 fps.

 

 

Looking through youtube videos playing Battlefield 1 with I7 2600K in MP where the players are getting around 70-90FPS is making me wonder, whether I am missing anything?

 

My first obvious bottleneck guess is the CPU.

I am guessing that the old Xeon chip is just not powerful enough to run a game like BF1 Multiplayer for 3 VMs at the same time and since the only upgrade way is either:

 

1. Get an Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 (12 core/24 Thread) 

2. Get a dual CPU X79 board and second 2680 v2

3. Upgrade to a new platform which would most likely be X570 with AMD Ryzen 9 4xxx once they come out and possible bugs will be fixed or Ryzen 9 3900X.

 

I would like to save myself the hassle of dealing with dual CPUs so now I am wondering, whether the upgrade to Ryzen 9 would bring the desired results here as I am aware that running 3 instances of BF1 or Multiplayer GTAV is not an easy task for 1 CPU, but given the fact, an old Xeon is half-way there (to almost stable 60 fps), I am guessing that 8 threads of Ryzen 9 3900x should be capable of providing enough performance.

I would also be throwing more RAM (64GB) in case of a platform upgrade for sure.

 

 

I was wondering, whether anyone here could either let me know, whether there is anything that I am missing and save me some money for upgrade

 

Since I am currently not at the unraid server location, I will not be able to post my config file, but basically, I am using "vcpupin" for the threads for each VM and hyper-V tweaks:

<hyperv> 
<relaxed state='on'/> 
<vapic state='on'/> 
<spinlocks state='on' retries='8191'/> 
<vpindex state='on'/> 
<synic state='on'/> 
<stimer state='on'/> 
<reset state='on'/> 
<vendor_id state='on' value='1234567890ab'/>  
<frequencies state='on'/>
</hyperv>

Please let me know.

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Performance on 8CPU's (3950X) in GTA was not impacted for me with my videocard (RX5700 or 2080TI). Most games will do fine with 4 cores personally, only exception for me was COD Warzone which required 8 cores for me to run at near 144fps@1440p on 2080ti or else bottleneck was visible clearly as i scaled down cores.