Steam streaming and multiple VMs

[Maniac]

Hi all,

Trying to figure out where my issue is here. Configuration or just hardware.

My tower has a "Intel Skylake i5 6600K CPU" with 16GB RAM. For a long time now I have been running this with a few Dockers and 2 VMs. 

 

VM 1 is for light gaming - Assigned 2 CPU cores - 12 GB RAM - GeForce GTX 670 GPU

VM 2 is LibreElec Kodi - Assigned 2 CPU cores - 2 GB RAM - GeForce GT 720 GPU

 

This is running just fine, and no issues. Now recently I have been started playing around with "Steam In-home streaming" on VM1. So that I can play on other devices like Intel NUC or my MacBook Pro. I got it working, but I seem to have some performance issues. 

 

On the host VM1, in Steam, I have enabled "Hardware Encoding" with "Beautiful" preset.

 

When starting a game-stream from a Client (MacBook) it runs fine at start. I can see in the lower right screen that it is using hardware encoding (NVENC). After a few seconds it just drops down to software encoding (libx264 - 1 thread) and gives me sluggish 10 fps at best. Plus a "Slow Encode" message appears. Unplayable. 

If I go to the host machine monitor, the game plays very well, super quality and resolution, no lag. 

 

Then I decided to shut down VM2, and assign all CPU cores to VM1.

Started everything up again. Started a new game-stream from the same client, and the game/stream runs perfectly smooth with full quality and 2560 resolution. no lag, no fps drop, stays always on hardware encoding. 

 

I am just trying to understand what is going on here. Is it just that my CPU cannot handle this when cores are pinned to VMs?

[Maniac]

Anyone?