[skizm]

Serious question: does this thing actually make games run really great? Or are they so optimized for AI/ML workloads that they either don’t work or run normal video games poorly?

Also:

> I arrived at a farmhouse in a small forest…

Were you not worried you were going to get murdered?

[dnhkng]

It was fun when the seller told me to come and look in the back of his dirty white van, because "the servers are in here". This was before I had seen the workshop etc.

[aeve890]

The lengths someone will go just to have a graphics card and some ram nowadays smh

[jaggirs]

I believe these gpus dont have direct hdmi/DisplayPort outputs, so at the very least its tricky to even run a game on them, I guess you need to run the game in a VM or so?

[the8472]

Copying between GPUs is a thing, that's how integrated/discrete GPU switching works. So if the drivers provide full vulkan support then rendering on the nvidia and copying to another GPU with outputs could work. And it's an ARM CPU, so to run most games you need emulation (Wine+FEX), but Valve has been polishing that for their steamframe... so maybe?

People have gotten games to run on a DGX Spark, which is somewhat similar (GB10 instead of GH200)

[dnhkng]

Correct! I added an Nvidia T400 to the rig recently, as it gives me 4x Display ports, and a whole extra 2GB VRAM!

[throawayonthe]

https://looking-glass.io/ could be interesting

[nicman23]

you can just force a edid in xorg and run sunshine (streaming)

[wtcactus]

Unfortunately sunshine introduces a lot of input lag on NVIDIA.

In AMD I’ve read it works great, but for NVIDIA chips, in mouse heavy games, it becomes unusable for me.

[nicman23]

really? that is not the case for me and i use it extensively both for work and games - i have a vdi solution.

[wtcactus]

Last time I've tried it was about 9 months ago and that was really an issue.

But I also think that for people that didn't try a "snappier" alternative, it was possible not to realize it's there.

Try and make a comparison with Parsec of even the Steam's own streaming. You will notice a big difference if the issue still exists.

[nicman23]

i did a test with just spamming date in a terminal and having a high fps video captured from my phone, it was usually under a frame (granted 60 fps so 1/60 sec)

[zamadatix]

I think the point of negative returns for gaming is going above the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell + AMD 9800X3D CPU + latency optimized RAM + any decent NVMe drive. Seems to net ~1.1x more performance than a normal 5090 in the same setup (and both can be overclocked about equally). Aside from what the GPU is optimized for, the CPU in these servers being ARM based ends up adding more overhead for games (and breaks DRM) which still assume x86 on Windows/Linux.

[Havoc]

>Serious question: does this thing actually make games run really great?

LTT tried it in one of their videos...forgot which card but one of the serious nvidia AI cards.

...it runs like shit for gaming workloads. It does the job but comfortably beaten by a mid tier consumer card for 1/10th the price

Their AI track datacenter cards are definitely not same thing different badge glued on

[fsckboy]

>Were you not worried you were going to get murdered?

he had left a trail of breadcrumbs. although he was hungry, it seemed a prudent precaution.

[mrandish]

> does this thing actually make games run really great

It's an interesting question, and since OP indicates he previously had a 4090, he's qualified to reply and hopefully will. However, I suspect the GH200 won't turn out to run games much faster than a 5090 because A) Games aren't designed to exploit the increased capabilities of this hardware, and B) The GH200 drivers wouldn't be tuned for game performance. One of the biggest differences of datacenter AI GPUs is the sheer memory size, and there's little reason for a game to assume there's more than 16GB of video memory available.

More broadly, this is a question that, for the past couple decades, I'd have been very interested in. For a lot of years, looking at today's most esoteric, expensive state-of-the-art was the best way to predict what tomorrow's consumer desktop might be capable of. However, these days I'm surprised to find myself no longer fascinated by this. Having been riveted by the constant march of real-time computer graphics from the 90s to 2020 (including attending many Siggraph conferences in the 90s and 00s), I think we're now nearing the end of truly significant progress in consumer gaming graphics.

I do realize that's a controversial statement, and sure there will always be a way to throw more polys, bigger textures and heavier algorithms at any game, but... each increasing increment just doesn't matter as much as it once did. For typical desktop and couch consumer gaming, the upgrade from 20fps to 60fps was a lot more meaningful to most people than 120fps to 360fps. With synthetic frame and pixel generation, increasing resolution beyond native 4K matters less. (Note: head-mounted AR/VR might one of the few places 'moar pixels' really matters in the future). Sure, it can look a bit sharper, a bit more varied and the shadows can have more perfect ray-traced fall-off, but at this point piling on even more of those technically impressive feats of CGI doesn't make the game more fun to play, whether on a 75" TV at 8 feet or a 34-inch monitor at two feet. As an old-school computer graphics guy, it's incredible to be see real-time path tracing adding subtle colors to shadows from light reflections bouncing off colored walls. It's living in the sci-fi future we dreamed of at Siggraph '92. But as a gamer looking for some fun tonight, honestly... the improved visuals don't contribute much to the overall gameplay between a 3070, 4070 and 5070.

[Scene_Cast2]

I'd guess that the datacenter "GPUs" lack all the fixed-function graphics hardware (texture samplers, etc) that's still there in modern consumer GPUs.

[jsheard]

They do still have texture units since sampling 2D and 3D grids is a useful primitive for all sorts of compute, but some other stuff is stripped back. They don't have raytracing or video encoding units for example.