Full 3d Gaming in Virtualization?

[LandyK]

Hello, I would like to have up to 10 guests on my machine all running windows 7 or 8 os and able to play minecraft or stracraft 1 maybe perhaps even stracraft 2 for me and some friends

I would like to know what kind of setup this would need, would I have to do vSGA or vGDA?

I currently have dual x5650, 48 gigs of ram, 1tb ssd, and an x58 x8 series supermicro mobo capable of vt-d

Also what graphics card is best suited for passthrough?  Can I use a gtx 580 or above like gtx 680?

Any help is much appreciated

[Davoud Teimouri]

Hi and welcome to community.

It's possible by using vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 and View 5.2 and above. You can present your host's graphic card GPUs to virtual machine by using Pass-Through or using new Nvidia and AMD ATI Radeon graphic cards.

Nvidia has GRID family and they have driver for ESXi, also AMD has new family same as Nvidia that they have ESXi driver.

You can find more information about them on manufactures sites.

Also I recommend, using Teradici APEX card and mix PCoIP offload with using GPU, it give you better graphic and processing experience.

[Proxymity]

Chances are good with NVIDIAs GRID cards ( Stream Applications and Games On Demand | NVIDIA GRID™ | NVIDIA ). But this will be a *bit* more expensive than a GTX 680 - or even one of the 800 series. You need a GPU which is made for virtualizing stuff (in this example, graphics) - the GTX series (and even the TITAN) isnt suitable for what you are planing to do (may it would work with the TITAN, but I think you'll have about 5 to 10 FPS).

Also you have to remember: sending out 30 FPS (30 FPS looks crappy, but is the lowest rate I suggest.. everything below 30 FPS is just "eye cancer" in gaming), you will need a fibre-network (lets take a 1920x1080px screen, its about ~2-3MB (without compressing - Ill just take "raw data" for this example), 30 frames per second will result in 60-90MB/s - if you have 10 clients, you'll have a datarate up to 600-900MB per second - beside the game traffic (which is normally insignificant low). Or you put in some more NICs, 5 NICs, from which every single one handles 2 clients, this could make it possible with the traffic when compressing the frames down.

The biggest problem which youll encounter is the traffic - In general, I think its possible to render "older" games in a virtualization with a good hardware when its possible to render huge CAD files among the network these days.