Enterprise Hardware for gaming

[somethingweird]

I know we seen a lot of gaming hardware for TRUEnas.

Has anyone thought of using Enterprise hardware for Gaming? haha. If so what spec. Must be 100% enterprise hardware including video card and etc.
Is it possible and what could it run?

 

[Arwen]

Sometimes their is a serious difference in Enterprise hardware for Data Center use, and using it for things like gaming. Many Enterprise computers use registered memory, which under some uses can be slower. This is because the amount of memory and ECC is more important that the last percent of speed.

Further, some Enterprise hardware is designed for multi-threaded uses, not maximum single threaded performance. So results can be mixed.

Now, using HPC, (High Performance Computing), like an AMD Thread Ripper is something different. For a while, both Intel and AMD paused / stopped producing CPUs for desktop HPC. But, AMD returned with new Thread Ripper models;

https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-threadripper-pro

Now it does use registered memory, though it is newer DDR5.


Here is an example of Enterprise verses other. When I worked at Sun Microsystems about 2007 we got some new servers, the T2000. This was Sun's, (and the worlds), first heavy multi-threaded CPU. It had 8 cores with 4 threads per core for a total of 32 CPU threads.

One of those T2000s was setup as a compile server. The users complained that their fast Sun desktops could compile code in 5 minutes, where the T2000 took 20 minutes. I then asked the user to do 2 compiles on each and give me back the times. The Sun desktop did 2 compiles in 10 minutes, (twice as long), but the T2000 with it's MANY threads took 20 minutes, (same time), FOR TWO!

So while the T2000 was not a speed daemon, nor had some of the fancy desktop features, in multi-threaded roles it ruled the data center.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I know we seen a lot of gaming hardware for TRUEnas.

Has anyone thought of using Enterprise hardware for Gaming? haha. If so what spec. Must be 100% enterprise hardware including video card and etc.
Is it possible and what could it run?

There may or may not have been games played on Precision workstations with Quadro/FireGL cards.

GPU performance isn't as good as the drivers are behind the times and optimized for accuracy in things like CAD/CAM rendering, not speed of enemy polygons, but they work. Just not the most cost-efficient certainly.

And anyone who's doing "cloud gaming" is very likely using Enterprise hardware in terms of an MxGPU or vGPU solution.

 

[Whattteva]

Has anyone thought of using Enterprise hardware for Gaming? haha. If so what spec. Must be 100% enterprise hardware including video card and etc.
Is it possible and what could it run?

I think there are plenty of content you can find where people do this. Most likely using some combination of Proxmox VM and passthrough regular GPU's or enterprise vGPU's (like nVidia Tesla) in combination with Parsec or even baremetal.

100% doable, but there are pitfalls:

• Some competitive online games with anti-cheat will ban you if they detect that the game is running in a VM.
• Performance will be good, but not as good as gaming gear in general. Enterprise CPU's are optimized for highly parallelized workflows and most games tend to run better with high single-thread performance.
• Server memory is buffered. This is good for stability, especially for running gobloads of it but introduces extra latency that will reduce performance. It's a tradeoff.
• vGPU's often require enterprise licensing (not cheap). They also often assume that it will be put in a rackserver with high airflow, so they often don't have their own fan, so you either have to actually use a rackserver or have to buy an aftermarket fan or jimmy-rig your own.

In general, use gaming hardware for gaming, and use enterprise for server workloads. In other words, use the right tool for the right job. Using the wrong tool for either job will still work fine, but you will end up paying more money for sub-optimal results.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I think there are plenty of content you can find where people do this.

r/VFIO is a good subreddit to check, as are Craft Computing's cloud gaming playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/@CraftComputing/playlists

 

[Pitfrr]

I'm using enterprise hardware (HP DL380 G6) with VMware installed, a FreeNAS VM running but also alongside an other VM with the GPU passed through (Nvidia K620). I'm also using the streaming feature from Nvidia (with NVIDIA SHIELD streaming) to play from a remote computer with Moonlight.
Given the HW, I'm certainly not running the latest new games! :-D
But for the games I'm playing occasionnaly, it works very good.

 

[Ericloewe]

Technically, I've been doing half of this with my Xeon E5-1650 v3 plus RDIMMs, albeit with normal consumer GPUs (GTX 780 for like a month, GTX 460 for a few months after the 780 died, GTX 980 for - holy crap, eight years!?).
At the time it wasn't super crazy, just a bit more expensive for a better platform and another bit for ECC. These days it's hard to imagine - consumer CPUs are just a lot faster for moderate numbers of threads.