Remote gaming capabilities and experience

[Marco2G]

Hello everyone!

 

Since I saw LinusTechTips two gamers, one rig the idea of doing something similar just will not take it's claws out of my brain. Basically my primary problem is noise. I have pretty sensitive hearing and even the low hum of the radiator fans or the fans of the mediacenter can drive me up a wall. So I wanted to combine the idea of having one central machine with Linus' closet rig: Moving the machine entirely out of my living space.

 

Now the problem is that Linus' solution (corning fiber thunderbolt cables and a thunderbolt hub) cost an arm and a leg and needs additional cabling through the house. It wouldn't be a problem for my gaming rig but the mediacenter is all the way across the house. I would like to use existing GigE. For the Mediacenter I though maybe a passively cooled thinclient using RDP could work, but to my eye, video playback seems choppy still.

 

I thought about PCoIP. Teradici offers hardware expansion cards to do this but they are pricey as well and still need a thinclient.

 

So before I sink a lot of money into this, what are options that actually would work and give a satisfactory gaming experience? I am not a hardcore FPS gamer so I don't need ridiculously minimal latency but smooth scrolling should be doable. I usually play games like Witcher, Assassin's creed, EUIV and Tomb Raider. I game at 1440p60 and the mediacenter is standard FullHD.

 

Which of these solutions, if there are any, are most cost effective? It doesn't need to be free. It doesn't even need to be cheap (I know, that's relative) but if I can basically build a PC for the money this project costs me per workplace then it's surely too expensive.

 

I would be very grateful for any input, be it the perfect solution or a clear "this isn't going to be possible". I just need to get this idea done with one way or another before I go insane.

 

Regards,

 

Marco

[IG82]

It is not completely clear what you are looking for.  Do you have hardware you want to use for the purpose or are you looking at what you would need?

 

I would say it is possible, although to be completely honest I haven't done what I call extensive testing yet.

 

My long term goal is to have unRAID with two graphics cards at least, one for my primary gaming PC connected directly to monitors and also streaming.  The second card would then be used for my girlfriend to stream when she wanted to play something.

 

I am pretty convinced it will work, I got an HTC Vive up and running and that was better on the VM than my baremetal machine.  Admittedly the spec was better on the VM (780ti vs 7970CF) but certainly no issues with input latency on the motion controllers.

 

I also have a Steam Link which I hope to use a bit today as I have a day off.  Will also be testing PC streaming to 1440p/4K monitors at some point too.

 

Get the right hardware for unRAID KVM, plus something like a passive Intel NUC/Gigabyte Brix and you should be able to do what you want.  This would be using your existing network cabling rather than messing with video over IP.

[Marco2G]

Well, let's see:

 

At the moment I have a mediacenter in the living room that is basically a normal PC with Windows 7 and a four disk RAID 10 which is shared with the gaming pc. It's attached to my tv for watching content and has an SSH server running for tunneling from my work computer. Also BitTorrent. This is always on.

 

Then I have my gaming PC with Windows 10. It's watercooled and still not quiet enough. My wife and I both have users on this.

 

I have an old Netgear router that is only providing Wififor the far side of the house at the moment and my ISP's router which provides Wifion the office side. I use Wifi almost exclusively for mobile phones.

 

My idea is to get an old G6 or G7 server from work, stuff it with disks (perhaps with SSD cache) and install unRAID on it. Then I would run a VM with pfSense for all my routing and firewall needs. Another VM that could be linux which would hold my Kodi mediacenter software. As I understand it, the NAS and BitTorrent parts would be handled by unRAID. A third VM running windows 7 (or 10 with extremely restricted internet access) would have a GeForce card attached through vt-d and would be my gaming rig. A fourth VM could be a linux workstation for the wife and I (because I'm really fed up with windows 10...)

 

Then I would have some device setup in the living room and another in my office to which I would attach speakers, headphones, mic, mouse, keyboard and of course the tv and monitor respectively. The receiving device would then open a console directly into a VM depending on my current needs.

 

I would love if all this could be done over simple ethernet but as I said, from what I gathered, normal remote access protocols wont do. Certainly not Teamviewer or VNC and even latest RDP is not meant for this kind of low latency. Just to be clear, the mediacenter only needs die provide adequate latency for watching 1080p content. However, the gaming rig needs to not only be higher resolution but is more latency dependent.

 

I mean if unRAID already offers a solution I'll feel dumb for not finding it but so far I am unsure of how to solve this without paying thousands on top of the server hardware.

[gundamguy]

I would love if all this could be done over simple ethernet but as I said, from what I gathered, normal remote access protocols wont do. Certainly not Teamviewer or VNC and even latest RDP is not meant for this kind of low latency. Just to be clear, the mediacenter only needs die provide adequate latency for watching 1080p content. However, the gaming rig needs to not only be higher resolution but is more latency dependent.

 

I mean if unRAID already offers a solution I'll feel dumb for not finding it but so far I am unsure of how to solve this without paying thousands on top of the server hardware.

 

Have you considered giving Steam In-Home Streaming a try? From my experience it works pretty well, they are still working some kinks out... and by that I mean it works really well, but they are working on perfecting it.

[Marco2G]

Yes, I thought about it but does it stream non steam games as well? Can I stream from a windows machine to a linux OS with steam client?

Edit: Never mind, it seems to work. This might indeed be a way to go.

[gundamguy]

Yes, I thought about it but does it stream non steam games as well? Can I stream from a windows machine to a linux OS with steam client?

Edit: Never mind, it seems to work. This might indeed be a way to go.

 

I see you found the answer, the answer to part A is well sort of... if you can add the launcher to steam it'll work with in home streaming. So maybe? Not sure if it will work with everything.

 

Also you can totally stream from windows to Linux OS or windows to Mac, it is recommended that your using Windows as your server though because it has better support, and works better from what I've heard.

[Marco2G]

I just tried it with a game and it seems to work!

 

So basically I could have a mini pc with DisplayPort here on which I'd install linux and the steam client. Now the only question remains, which mini pc would that be? Intel NUC system look good but do I really need a Core i processor? I'd prefer it if the machine was passively cooled. In fact, without that, the whole project makes no sense .

[gundamguy]

I just tried it with a game and it seems to work!

 

So basically I could have a mini pc with DisplayPort here on which I'd install linux and the steam client. Now the only question remains, which mini pc would that be? Intel NUC system look good but do I really need a Core i processor? I'd prefer it if the machine was passively cooled. In fact, without that, the whole project makes no sense .

 

You know that is a good question. I've heard the capabilities of the client don't have to be that robust, but I'm not sure what the recommended specs are.

 

I know steam also pushed out it's own Streaming Client Machine last fall called the SteamLink which is passively cooled and about the size of a 1 inch thick credit card... so I would imagine the requirements are pretty low. I'd see what you can find in the In-Home Streaming community on steam. 

[Marco2G]

I assumed that the SteamLink does not offer a full fledged Linux OS. I have my doubts that it coiuld open an RDP session or something along those lines.

[gundamguy]

I assumed that the SteamLink does not offer a full fledged Linux OS. I have my doubts that it coiuld open an RDP session or something along those lines.

 

No it totally would not.

 

So yeah, I mostly brought it up because it leads me to believe that the CPU requirements to handle the in-home streaming part must not be too high. The server needs to have a pretty beefy CPU but the client seems like it would be ok having something that you could passively cool.

[Marco2G]

It was a frustrating search, but I may have stumbled upon the right thing here:

 

Zotac ZBOX CI323 nano. Passively cooled and has DisplayPort. I'll look into it some more to make sure there isn't something inherently wrong with this. Amazon.de reviews are pretty positive and people seem to be using this as an office machine. Sounds perfect.

[DoeBoye]

Have you considered HDMI over IP? You could install two videocards in the server, and run hdmi to the tv for the media player, and to monitors for gaming. You would need to passthrough keyboard and mouse for gaming, and you can get ir repeaters to pass the signal back to the media center for your remote (some hdmi over IP solutions actually come with it built in)...

 

This is what I'm thinking of doing once 6.2 goes live...

 

[EDIT] And best of all, no extra thinClients. No noise at all...

[Marco2G]

My 1440p monitor will only do 30Hz over HDMI. If that wasn't the case, I would totally have tried HDMI .

[DoeBoye]

My 1440p monitor will only do 30Hz over HDMI. If that wasn't the case, I would totally have tried HDMI .

 

Cost effectiveness, ease-of-use, and functionality -wise, perhaps it would be better to sell the monitor and replace it with one that can support higher Hz over HDMI? I'm seeing $200 (CDN) per Zotac ZBOX CI323, with no guarantees of performance over console for gaming....

 

Well... ok... maybe not as cost-effective , if you factor in the cost of the extenders and a new monitor, but you would have bare-metal performance for video and gaming. Personally, it would irritate me to have to deal with latency while watching movies/gaming.

[Marco2G]

To my astonishment, latency wasn't noticable in my Deadpool testrun. I had some skipping issues that were fixed by activating v-sync (don't ask me why). I'll test with Bioshock and perhaps Tomb Raider. If that works, then streaming is okay for me. I'll probably never play faster games than that.

[Haldi]

 

 

Intel NUC system look good but do I really need a Core i processor?

I've mainly used inHome Streaming on my Surface Pro3, but I've also used it for a short while on my Minix Z64w with Atom 3735F which was 100$. It worked.

 

I agree that RDP is not usable for gaming. But for normal windows tasks I prefer it over VNC any time.