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Re: [Xen-users] Games



On Fri, 24 May 2013 11:59:45 +0200, <J.Witvliet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but perhaps somebody around has tried
something like this.

I bought a game for my son, and verified that it got "platinum
status" for wine.
However, the general requirements are way too heavy for his current
machine, even without wine.

WINE overheads are pretty minimal in my experience - if you can ever
get anything to work at all regardless of the platinum rating.

So, I was contemplating if (!) it might be possible to have a
virtualized xp/w7 running the game.

So far so easy. The current caveats are that with VGA passthrough
you are likely to have problems with > 2GB of RAM in the VM. Other
issues are work-aroundable.

The piece of software (truck driving simulator) is asking:
-Dual core CPU 3.0 GHz
-4 GB RAM, graphics card with 1024 MB memory (GeForce GTS 450-class
equivalent or better)

4GB of RAM may or may not be a problem. From what has been said, it
depends on the MMIO size on your machine. On my machine that is 2GB.
You may be lucky and get away with 3-4GB.

I already have several virtual machines running, mix of Linux (mostly
servers) and XP (desktop chores),
But never tried virtualized gaming.

If you have an ATI card or an Nvidia Quadro, it "just works".
I have extensively tested Borderlands 2 on this setup. :)

With a non-Quadro Nvidia card things get much more problematic and
you'll have to manually patch the Xen sources and build your own
binaries. Fighting all the other issues is plenty of hard work and
I would advise against it if you can at all help it - unless your
time is worthless, investing Â30 or so into an ATI 4850 is likely
to be a bargain compared to the time and effort you are likely to
spend on getting a non-Quadro Nvidia card to work.

So I presume that installing the game poses no problem, but playing
might be something else.
- with regards to CPU-load...

How many CPU cores has your VM host got and what are they? I have
no issues playing Borderlands 2 on a dual Xeon X5650 with 8 of the 24
threads (4 of the 12 cores) given to the VM.

- with regards to graphics: Could I get away with a TSC-client over
the network?

Dream on.

What you might be able to do is hook up something like a wireless
HDTV transciever (a-la Intel WiDi) and wireless mouse/keyboard
and use it that way. But sending 60fps of reasonable resolution video
over something like VNC? I don't see it happening.

Anyone who ever tried it? Worthwhile trying or forget it straight away?

Everything up to the last bit should be fine if you can live with the
current RAM limitation.

Gordan

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