[itsfatz]

Ages ago I spun an aws instance w/ Grid, setup VPN and used Steam in-home streaming to accomplish a similar result. Using spot-instances resulted in something like $0.06/hr if memory serves (which it seldom does).

Biggest caveats at that time were setup time and latency; since I was too cheap to preserve the instance volume and too lazy to split the steam save folder to a smaller separate volume, and had yet to secure gigabit fiber.

It was more of a dalliance for me since I don't game often anymore, and if I'm honest with myself I enjoyed setting up the infrastructure more than I did playing Fallout 4. Please note this has more to do with how little fun I am in my old age than any problems with the game.

[013a]

Pricing and capabilities have probably changed over the years. The cheapest GPU spot instance you can get on AWS today is a p2.xlarge, which will run you $0.45/hr. And also, p2-class instances run Tesla K80 GPUs, which are Kepler cores, an architecture running on 6 years old now (think GTX 600/700). Fine for 1080p60 most games, but I doubt many modern titles would hit the 60fps mark.

Google Cloud can allow you to get the cost lower (closer to ~$0.15/hr) by cost optimizing the instance CPU/Memory and attaching a GPU to it.

But you've got three problems with both of these setups:

- Spot on AWS/Preemptible on GCP will kill your instance with about 2 minutes of warning. I'm not sure what AWS's policy is on how often this happens, but on GCP, its guaranteed to happen at least once every 24 hours. So that could be annoying if you're in the middle of an intense game of Overwatch.

- Storage costs. You're paying per hour for your instance, so you don't want to have to download all your games every time you spin it up. But, then you shift the cost to the SSD, which is expensive and must be maintained 24/7/365 for that quick startup time. You could alternatively store it in S3/GCS then hot-load it when the instance starts, which would be fast due to the fiber interconnect all these datacenters are wired with. So, plan for this bullet to add at least $10/mo/TB of storage.

- Network costs. A 1080p60 stream is, conservatively, 10Mbps? Add on an extra ~$0.25 per hour you want to game, just in bandwidth.

[rco8786]

It was closer to 0.50 an hour fwiw. And in practice that wasn’t realistic as the gpu spot prices would often spike to tens of dollars per hour, presumably as someone else ran some really large jobs.

A friend and I tried to systematize/automate this exact thing. And we were relatively successful in building it. But it turns out that spot prices are incredibly volatile and steam streaming is still pretty buggy so we abandoned it.