Virtual machine gaming?

Hi,

I am building a new rig and likely swap my surface pro in my lounge out for a shield android tv. (then sell my surface pro)

Currently the wife and I play some games together ( usually something like civ 5 - rarely anything very graphically intensive).

However if I get rid of the surface pro I will only have 1 PC in the house. I was wondering if it is at all possible to set up a VM. Run 1 copy of steam and Civ on the VM, split to 1 monitor (with a separate keyboard/mouse) and then run a 2nd version on the local PC.

I would want it set up so my PC has 100% of its resources until I boot up the VM, then it can have 50% of my cpu cores and 50% of my memory. However it will only have 1 Nvidia GPU at its heart (exact card undecided at the moment, but lets say a 980 as an example).

The 980 I feel is more than capable of running 2 versions of this game, even if I have to compromise on video settings slightly, its just a question of weather modern day VM applications can share the GPU grunt or not.

Thanks in advance

Not sure if you are going to have enough horsepower with the overhead of the VM (CPU wise)... but its worth a try. Report back with your findings!

For old games in a virtual machine, it works ok. For anything recent, it will flat out not work or it will run very slowly.

the CPU running this will be a 6700k, so I am hoping it will be sufficient.

It was the GPU I was nervous about as I heard rumors that VMs couldn't use dedicated graphics cards.

Firey_chasm said:

the CPU running this will be a 6700k, so I am hoping it will be sufficient.

It was the GPU I was nervous about as I heard rumors that VMs couldn't use dedicated graphics cards.

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Yes and no. If you had a second card, you could pass it through to the virtual machine, and it should, in theory, work. However, I really doubt it.

Firey_chasm said:

the CPU running this will be a 6700k, so I am hoping it will be sufficient.

Click to expand...

Ahh... I thought it would be running against the old school quad in your sig... that may be a different story...

If I'm right then you can't run any good graphics on VM just because it requires additional drivers. All VM drivers are only in standard mode as they're designed for servers. Maybe something has changed recently but it wasn't possible when I was checking that last time.

Thanks for the responses, with that in mind is there any other way people are aware of that I can run two instances of the same game on the same PC?

the surface is just quite an expensive device just to keep around for those odd times me and my wife play a game (once every 2-3months!)

Games are simply not made to run multiple instances on the same machine. Some might work (by accident on the developers part) and I've never seen one advertised as such.

The only way I think you might be able to get it to work is to have a second graphics card and pass the entire card through to the virtual machine. This would give the virtual machine direct access to the hardware. However, there is likely something which won't play nice, and you'd need two cards to even test it out.

Keep an eye out on AMD announcing news on cloud gaming/virtual machine videos.

There is some really cool technology that is in use atm. What I can say is this new tech will allow gaming on a virtual machine as if it was your own PC.

ive read about this software before it seems pretty neat, thought about using it for some of my lan parties. i dont know alot about it really but you can look into it http://www.miniframe.com/blog/21-blog-home/323-multi-seat-gaming-howto.html basically turns one computer into multiple work stations.

Well, seeing as I tend to run virtual machines, will that mean I can be running 2012 R2 or Server 2016 as the host with Linux and 8.1/10 Guests and be gaming on the 8.1/10? All simultaneously?

NZKshatriya said:

Well, seeing as I tend to run virtual machines, will that mean I can be running 2012 R2 or Server 2016 as the host with Linux and 8.1/10 Guests and be gaming on the 8.1/10? All simultaneously?

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a little derailing going on, but no.

Dolk said:

Keep an eye out on AMD announcing news on cloud gaming/virtual machine videos.

There is some really cool technology that is in use atm. What I can say is this new tech will allow gaming on a virtual machine as if it was your own PC.

Click to expand...

At my office we are largely setup for VDI (at a college). We have most classrooms setup with thin clients, and we are currently in the process of working with vGPU (vmware's virtual graphics usage with nVidia cards that are in the servers). It works decently well, I tested it out playing through a good portion of Portal at 1280x1024 and it was mostly playable, I wouldn't want to do anything super switchy but for medium/low settings it worked well enough.

Gaming is possible with a Virtual Machine, but it requires that you have a motherboard supported for I/O passthrough by your hypervisor of choice. The guy who has the site homeserverblog.com has four virtual machines setup all with dedicated graphics cards and hdmi/usb over network for his two htpcs, wife's machine and his son's gaming machine.

Thanks for all the response guys. It sounds like 1 gpu will just not be able to do what I am after