Haven’t tried to mysef but you should be able to use Easy GPU PV to make a vm that your friends can play in without interrupting you.
Actually you could remove most of the drawbacks if you split up your gpu (there are multiple technologies which enable you to do that, but your gpu would need to support at least one of them) and give each of your friends a virtual machine to play on. That way everyone could play at the same time. Though you get a new drawback : the experience would certainly be very limited if you share the GPU resources with multiple VMs. I think VRAM is fixed so if you have 16gb of vram and two virtual machines each with 5GB of VRAM you got yourself 6GB left, no matter if someone is actually playing on one of the VMs.
So I am going to treat this as a thought experiment and not something you are actually going to make an effort to do.
Utilizing enterprise hardware and software you could standup a GPU accelerated Virtual desktop environment. Lookup VMWare Horizon View. About 10 years ago we tested a new VDI server by playing a CS:GO lan game on a clients server that was 100ish miles from us in a datacenter. It let eight players all run over 100fps with no noticable latency. We accessed them via Teradici zero clients.
CS:GO uses Source engine which is more CPU dependent than GPU though. It'll depend on what games OP plans to host. I think this is more along the lines of what OP is after though.
Craft computing did several videos on YouTube for "cloud gaming" servers. Maybe check that out.
You could set up each of them a Steam-headless docker container. I use one on my nas to game on a very low end laptop.
Ooh this is interesting. My gaming computer only runs windows currently but since I wouldn't be able to game when my friends used it I could just reboot into Linux when I'm not using it.
Seems like it needs a dedicated gpu so only one person could use it at a time but that's fine
My gaming computer only runs windows currently but since I wouldn't be able to game when my friends used it I could just reboot into Linux when I'm not using it.
I personally run it on a linux system, but If you wanted to I don't see why you couldn't just run docker on your windows install (Make sure you follow the wsl 2 guide, and not the hyper-v one. Docker for Windows doesn't support gpu passthrough on hyper-v). As for the gpu issue while I've never tried gaming simultaneously, I do have several docker containers accessing 1 gpu. So it might be worth a shot to see if they could all, or at least a couple, could play off of the one gpu, but it would depend on how heavy the games you're playing are of course.
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