Building a virtual desktop server that users play games like WoW on there own account, what type of hardware do I need for a physical server?

Question

Ok a little better explanation because the question box is small.

I want to create a server that is capable of running 100s or 1000s of remote virtual desktops simultaneously that have the computing power to play online pc games such as WoW and in the future I'd like to expand to them being able to play games that have better graphics. But for now just lower graphics games. I've got the software part of it taken care of as much as I can without having built a large server, but hardware isn't my forte.

What do I need to build a large physical server, like how good of a CPU and GPU, same with motherboard. I don't know how powerful of these things I need and I don't want or have the money to go out and buy a pre-built server, plus they are not made for what I'm trying to do.

I'm not creating a bunch of virtual machines on the server because then I would also need to create vCPU's and vGPU's. No, I want all users to share the resources of the server and be able to log into it remotely and play online pc games.

I don't know if I can have 100s or 1000s of simultaneous users playing games at the same time on a server each using virtual desktops on the server, but if not how many simultaneous users is possible and what hardware would I need to build my own physical server.

Is there a set amount of ram, or gpu ram, or anything else I should make sure each user has at least?

Please help if you can and thank you in advance if you do.

Answer 1

Virtualizing a gaming desktop is one of the hardest tasks that virtualization software can do. Most virtualization software cannot emulate a real video card, so they always attempt to pretend that they're running on just an ancient VGA graphics card from 30 years ago. That's good enough for emulating an office desktop, but it won't have support for DirectX or Vulcan which is what modern games use as their API. There is some experimental support available from various virtualizers for either Nvidia or AMD graphics virtualization, and it requires support from the GPU vendor at the hardware level.



The CPU architecture is easy to virtualize nowadays, as they are pretty much all set on the x86 instruction set that is standardized between Intel and AMD processors. However, there isn't a common instruction set between AMD and Nvidia GPU hardware. You would likely need to buy the commercial versions of GPU's, such as Nvidia Tesla or AMD Instinct, which would involve spending thousands of dollars.

Answer 2

i don't think you understand how this sort of thing works, which is understandable.

to have a server running a vdesktop environment, you need to look at the specs of the game you want to support (WoW's is here:

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/76459), and multiply the specs by the amount of users or vdesktops you want to support.

in this case, the minimum is a Core i5, which is one of the fastest CPUs available. it also requires GTX graphics card, which, again, is one of the fastest.

so it would be pretty impossible to manage 100 users on one server, much less 1000.

you MIGHT be able to do 3, if you use SSDs and have tons of RAM, but standard rack servers are NOT designed for gaming, and often do not support video cards. so you would need a high-end desktop that supports virtualization, which is rarer than you'd think, and would be quite pricey.

gaming (and video editing) is the most involved and intense thing you can do on a computer, and needs a gast rig just for 1 player...

Answer 3

If you have the software side taken care of, you should know the hardware requirements your software (and the games) need.

Same thing for the question about how many users your software can handle simultaneously - it depends on the software you claimed to have taken care of.



So something is not quite right here.



In real life, though, the problem is not the server power - you can always scale up a server by putting more CPUs in it - it's the location and connections to the server, which in turn determine the round trip delay (part of what gamers like to call "lag"). Which is the main reason why the only companies that are now coming up with this kind of stuff commercially are the ones with the large distributed server farms.



But assuming that question is legit - check it out for yourself.

WoW recommends an i5-3300, 4G RAM and a GTX 750 Ti.

The i5-3300 has a PassMark rating of ~6,000, a i7-8700k ~16,000, so that i7 should be able to run ~3 players simultaneously

The GTX 750 Ti is rated at ~4000, a 1080 Ti at ~14,000, a regular 1080 at 12,000 - so again, the 1080 would be sufficient to serve ~3 players

That is assuming you are going to build your server from regular desktop components and your software is simply running an independent instance for each player witout being able to use any synergies.

For other hardware configurations (e.g. you're going to use actual server hardware), the corresponding benchmarks should be available. And again it would depend on your software how the system requirements will scale with the number of players.