[jophde]

Or just spend $500 one time on a local rig one time that can max out 1080p at 100+frames instead of paying more per year for less.

I know this is for private use but the only point of game streaming is so that companies can put ads in stream.

[cle]

My son plays about 6 hours of BeamNG and X-Plane a week. It’s much cheaper (and faster) for him to play on an EC2 instance with Parsec at $.50/hr than to invest the money and space in an equivalent gaming rig. And he can play it wherever we go.

Setup details: I use Paperspace since it has an image with everything already configured (doing this is surprisingly tricky, I was never able to get GPU drivers installed and configured myself after hours of trying and also trying various AMIs). It has auto-shutdown after an hour of inactivity. I use VirtualHere to forward a joystick to the host, and Parsec for streaming. It works great, and I pay $.50/hr plus $5/mo for storage. Over WiFi with the cheapest Comcast plan, the latency is about 30 ms, which is fine for those games.

[boxerbk]

Really happy to hear you and your son are getting a lot of value from Parsec's streaming tech. Let me know if you have any suggestions/ideas to improve the product. Thanks!

[cle]

Nice to see someone from Parsec here! USB forwarding like VirtualHere would be nice, so that I don’t have to fiddle with that every time I start the instance.

IIRC I tried the Parsec AMI but it was difficult to use and required a lot of fiddling. I can’t remember the details unfortunately, but I would have preferred to just use that instead of Paperspace (this might be a niche use case since I’m an engineer). If I could have figured that out, I would have written a CLI around it and open sourced it for others to use.

Also because I’m an engineer, I really wanted to read the source code to see how it worked. But I get that it’s your magic sauce :).

Thanks for the awesome tech!

[hedora]

I just set it up last night. Great stuff, but fix your manual.

Concretely, update the “solutions for cloud rented pc’s” section at this link: https://support.parsecgaming.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002601...

(Which the client points at)

On paperspace, you need to set up a paid public IP, or deal with higher latency. Now I know what ZeroTier is, but my network latency was 100ms under load vs 30 with the public IP...

It took me four hours to debug this. Also, why does the server send every other UDP packet to a mysterious port on startup? (According to tcpdump on my router)

Also, in the question about broken mouse cursors, the correct answer is to close the paperspace web tab displaying the desktop of the instance.

Cheers!

[boxerbk]

Thanks. We definitely fall behind once in awhile on the support articles. Fixing it now.

[hedora]

Overall, your documentation is excellent; otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered nit picking it.

I’ll definitely recommend parsec to friends. I got rid of my last windows box a while back, but I have a few windows-only steam titles that I’d like to play.

Moving forward, my gaming desktop is something like a 25% of the household electricity budget. I hate wasting all that power, so I really want to replace it with a thin client.

[hedora]

One other thing: Your onboarding flow at the paperspace blog still points to parsec.tv. It made me wonder if you went out of business until I found the new download links.

https://blog.paperspace.com/setting-up-your-cloud-gaming-rig...

[ineedasername]

$0.50 an hour only amounts to 200 hours of gaming for the price of a rig capable enough to play games at qualities that are going to be streamed. That plus $0 for Hamachi ($50/year if you need more than 5 computers on the network) works pretty well. I've tried Paperspace, and the performance was about the same. I will say that the Shadow streaming service I thought was superior to all other options I tried, but also far more expensive for not enough of a difference.

[cle]

It might make sense for some people, I'm not saying that everyone should do this.

My son's young enough that he still goes through phases. That and he leaves every summer to go to his grandparents'. Sticking with cloud gaming gives me the freedom to just throw everything away or stop using it for long periods of time without guilt.

Also, it honestly makes me feel better to know that I didn't buy a bunch of fancy hardware to to use 3.6% of the time. AWS rents the hardware out to somebody else when I'm not using it, and is strongly incentivized to get its utilization as close to 100% as possible.

[friedman23]

Have you tried alternatives like stadia and gefore now? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I have a gaming pc with a 4770k and a 1080ti. I was considering upgrading it with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation (this is the lie I tell myself) but with things like colab pro coming out I'm considering if the future (for my use case) will just be renting hardware.

[cle]

I did try GeForce Now, since it has BeamNG. From what I could tell, it was about the same as Paperspace, except I didn't have access to the underlying OS so I couldn't install mods outside of Steam. It doesn't have X-Plane. It's slightly cheaper and easier to use since you don't have to manage the lifecycle of a host.

And Stadia doesn't have either game.

If you run your own host, you can play whatever game you want, and mod it however you feel like. Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever curated stuff the platform provides.

[Aperocky]

> with the excuse that it would be my ML workstation

Ah, I see we're alike.

I'm glad I went ahead and got a gaming rig from best buy for $900. Because after playing legacy games at extremely high frame rate for about 2 weeks, I proceed to spend all my spare time on a random javascript game.

At this rate I'll get to my ML workstation and train my own GAN at 2035.

[ineedasername]

Stadia is a complete non-starter for me because of a highly limited selection and no ability to bring my Steam & GOG library into it.

[crazygringo]

Or maybe you're in a small apartment without space for a desktop and don't have time to game that often so this is actually a better, more cost-effective solution?

Everybody's needs are different -- there's no reason to dismiss this.

[Aeolun]

I find it hard to imagine I’ll ever live in an apartment where I won’t make space for a desktop.

But my experience with cloud gaming on EC2 has been pretty great too, as I’m getting older I feel less and less inclined to shell out for a new video card every two years.

[jophde]

As long as you are fine with 1080p cards from 5+ years ago are fun. 4k is generally not worth it.

[cumunism]

1440 @ higher refresh than 60 and 4k@60 is very well worth it these days. especially on a nice LG OLED with gsync ;)'

HDR is pretty sweet, too.

HN is horrible for gaming/pc building advice. much better places.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> 1440 @ higher refresh than 60 and 4k@60

I've tried 1440p @ 144 hz and 4K @ 60 hz, and I'll take the 144 hz any day.

> HN is horrible for gaming/pc building advice. much better places.

Absolutely. I come here for my tech news and discussion, but gaming? No way.

[jophde]

Thats what I have and a 1070 is still find for most games.

[runawaybottle]

I’m not trying to take away from streaming gaming, but I find a sub 1000 dollar gaming laptop can let you play a LOT of pc games (laptop being your smallest form factor and all-in-one package with a display, etc). Budget gaming laptop really helped me get away from my MacBook which basically killed the gamer in me for years (can’t play shit on it).

Last time I tried GeForce Now in beta, there was a very perceptible delay in input. Not sure if that’s still the case now.

[jophde]

Everyone going to this would ruin games. These streaming services will always have compression artifacts or jitter which kills immersion. Worse they will be more expensive over time than hardware. Even worse your games can get deleted and you won’t own anything. Worse there will he ads put into the stream.

[ineedasername]

Price is comparison will be variable. If you're chasing the highest specs and framerates, you're spending more than streaming would cost. As for artifacts, I played most of Assassin's Creed Odyssey at the highest specs through Shadow and noticed barely any difference between the gaming rig I have, running it at the same settings. And I still owned the game, it was installed from my Steam library. Not owning is a legitimate concern with something like Stadia, but not most other services. Ads in Streams? Again, maybe for Stadia if they release a free version, but for most services where you're basically buying a friendly front end to something like EC2 and running from your own library of games, no- Ads are not an issue. You're already paying for the commodity computing, and Amazon or whoever will no more insert ads to game streams than they would an RFP session.

[chrisseaton]

> the only point of game streaming is so that companies can put ads in stream

I don't want to own gaming hardware - I don't want the space taken up, the hassle of the upgrades, and I'm a super-super-casual gamer so I don't want to invest in anything. It sounds perfect for me and I can't wait for it to be working well!

[jophde]

It’s never going to work as well unless you are playing the kinds of games where latency doesn’t matter.

[marvion]

Jup. Tried DIY cloudgaming a few times, almost signed up for shadow/Google, but then just bought a 200$ card and now I'm able to play all games, from any store I want, for next 2-3 years.

In case of AWS/cloud it's not just gaming but also always thinking about aws/technical stuff..

If you can afford to buy all games on steam and have 1gig internet - go ahead and use a cloudgaming service. But you'll see the video compression and you won't be able to play the great game you once bought at humblebundle.

[jjeaff]

I think the biggest thing that stadia is trying to enable is being able to play all games on non-windows systems. You could play a desktop game on your android phone or even on your Chromebook.

[jophde]

I run a linux desktop with windows installed as a kvm guest with GPU passthrough which gives near bare metal performance.

[verall]

Do you have a link to a guide for this or more info? This is really interesting.

My main desktop is dual booted but I never really boot into Linux since I often game, although I really prefer Linux interface+desktop. If Windows could be a kvm guest and GPU passthrough worked I would def go with that option.

edit: I found this which seems to give a good overview but I'm still curious if you have any tips/hacks for getting it working.

[jophde]

It’s kind of difficult to setup but you will learn a lot of you don’t have much virt experience. I recommend trying to share as little as possible. Pass through a whole pcie usb hub to guest instead if separate devices. Buy a second pcie NIC. Use a cheap AMD card for the host (better for linux) and NVIDIA for your guest. Don’t try to share your motherboard audio just use the passed through cards audio out of HDMI and display port. Get an AB switch to change which machine your KB/M is on instead of software. Basically only share your processor and memory. I have linux on a m2 nvme and my guest has a big ssd all to itself.

[jjeaff]

And the hoops you had to jump through to do that is one validation of why products like stadia might be in demand.

[jophde]

The whole point of doing that is to not have to run dual boot or have Windows on your bare metal. Do you think someone who cares about that wants to give Google absolute power over their gaming?

Building a rig and just putting Windows 10 on it and installing steam takes about an hour if you have done it before and about 6 hours if you haven’t and have a tutorial. You could just also buy a prebuilt rig for 10 percent more.

[benologist]

I have an eGPU and I find Geforce Now to be more convenient when I want to stream to TV, and when I don't want to reboot into Windows which is often. It's actually so convenient I often wonder if I could just use a Shield TV for PC gaming, the only downside is several of my favorite games are not yet playable on Geforce Now.

[zwayhowder]

I have a similar setup and use SteamLink to stream to my shield for a lot of games. Works a treat for most of my games which are on Steam anyway.

[dillonmckay]

What card?

[ldoughty]

Perhaps, but this article is ridiculous and great.

There are a FEW legitimate reasons to go this route, but not many good ones, but I have to commend this article for true hacker spirit. It's lovely!

[Deimorz]

There are about 10 major game streaming services available now, and none of them inject any advertising as far as I know.

Which ones are you referring to?

[ineedasername]

If Stadia goes for a free tier, that's the most likely candidate. But I can't imagine any service where it's basically a friendly front end to an EC2 clone trying to insert ads.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Its not about ads, IMHO. At least in Google's case, I bet the biggest thing in it for them, from a long term perspective, is the most literal gamification of crowd-sourced AI training.

[detaro]

And then lug the local rig around the country for the occasional game?

[pathartl]

This is assuming that wherever you're going to be has enough bandwidth to support streaming games.

Hotel internet seems to be about 10 years behind the current technology at all times.

[bronco21016]

Yea this is where I envision this working best for me. I travel for work and have been playing a ton on RetroPie lately. I wouldn’t mind being able to bring a SBC of some sort and being able play higher end games on the hotel TV. I don’t like lugging around a bunch of extra stuff.

[jophde]

You can build a 1080p rig that is about as big as a Nintendo Switch.

[detaro]

Now I'm curious: GPs ~$500, lets say max double the volume of a Switch + Dock, even if we exclude the screen and input devices seems like a quite tall order.

You can build some fairly impressive SFF PCs, but even an InWin Chopin breaks that volume budget if I've done the math right, and it's not a cheap hobby. They to me feel like a class above this.

[jophde]

You could definitely go eGPU + intel NUC and tape them together for 2x Switch + Dock. M2 nvme drives are tiny and I think some boards take laptop memory. You really only need the equivalent of a gtx 970 to do 1080p which probably exists in Pci x4.

[ineedasername]

Nuc makes a model called a Hades Canyon that is an awesome gaming rig for its form factir. 4k at mid-range settings, 1080p at anything you can throw at it. (And I'll be honest... Maybe I'm getting old, but from 2 feet away I can't tell the differece between 1080 and 4k.)

[detaro]

And double the "just spend $500 one time" initially suggested as being the solution.

[ineedasername]

Yeah, I didn't want to build so I sprang for an Intel Nuc Hades Canyon, and it was a significant, massive upgrade from my 3yr old gaming rig. And it streams through Hamachi like a champ.

[ineedasername]

Yep, this plus Hamachi is my personal streaming server.