I don't know how many gamers are on here but here is something for the frugal gamer. Been an avid gamer all my life. However, recently, through various moves, I found myself in a situation where I simply couldn't justify the upfront costs of gaming given how little time per week I am able to spend on the hobby (little in my opinion, pretty sure the average person thinks that I am an avid gamer) Even with the Xbox one going on sale I still couldn't justify such a large purchase. Having researched a bunch of alternative options (emulators, gaming on my android cellphone, and playing old games on my 2012 laptop), I simply couldn't satisfy my craving to finish playing The Witcher 3. Here is a solution that I found that I am very happy with and was ridiculously surprised that it is not more talked about. I've been into gaming and technology all my life and have never heard of anyone even remotely mentioning it. Granted, it's a fairly new option.
Cloud gaming - It's cheap (about .40 - .80 per hour), has no upfront costs (in Google's case they even give you a $300 credit), and requires nothing more than a decent internet connection and any average, old laptop (I haven't quite experimented with just how far down the specs list you can go). Here is a small rundown of the top three platforms that I found to be best bangs for your buck type of thing. Note: your internet should be 10 mbps or higher. Edit: Forgot mention that you pay for what you use per hour and, unless you setup through Parsec, you don't even pay the use time upfront but at the end of the month.
Google Cloud: cost - 5/5, setup - 2/5. This is by far the best deal money wise because Google gives you a $300 trial credit that is good for a year, which translates to a LOT of gaming hours. Unfortunately, Google's platform is the most difficult to setup out of the three. Don't get me wrong you don't need to be a technology wizard but it is a platform that is used mostly by very large companies with IT departments and a lot of software engineers, which means that their UI isn't exactly meant for the average consumer. Having said that, it is not all that difficult either:
- Open a free trial account
- Go to "Cloud Launcher", "Compute Engine", "Go To Compute Engine", "Create Instance"
- Under "Region", select USCentral, USEast, USWest, or Northamerica-northeast (at the time of this writing, UScentral and USEast are the only servers with GPU options). Then select any zone (not sure if there is a way to check to see where the zone is at since you want the one closest to you).
- Under "Machine Type", I recommend "4vCPU 15 GB Memory". Best bang for the bang in my opinion.
- Under "Boot Disk", select "Windows Server 2016 Datacenter". Make sure that you pick the one that says "Server with Desktop Experience" underneath. I chose 300 gb of space. Choose the amount that you think you'll need for your games.
- At this point you might notice that the "per month" estimates in the right hand corner are looking rather large. Don't panic. Those estimates are based on running the server 24/7. You'll only be using it when you game. Which brings me to a rather important point, DO NOT FORGET to turn your server off when you are done gaming (not your real pc, the actual virtual server that you created). Otherwise you'll run out of money rather quickly. You can also set it up to turn off automatically after a period of inactivity.
- Under "Machine Type", on the right hand side, click "customize" and then click "GPU". Under "Number of GPUs" select 1 and choose the NVIDEA Tesla K80 under "type".
- Click "create" on the bottom of the screen
- It will give you an error saying you don't have enough quota. Click on "Request Increase". Click on "Metric", "None", and then select "NVIDEA K80 GPU". On the list below find your location, click on the box on the left and click on "Edit Quota". Select 1 under what amount to increase it by and as for the reason, I just wrote "Need the GPU API for my virtual machine." I don't think that it really matters what you type.
- Now you just wait for them to approve it, which admittedly can take several days. After the setup, you have two choices of connecting your virtual machine: use remote SSH client like Terminal in Linux or Mac or SSH in Windows, or you can use the free Parsec client (my preference).
Paperspace: cost - 4/5, setup - 4/5. You can get a $10 credit to your Paperspace account by applying a code (there is a lot of them all of over the net) which will be good for about 25 hours or so of gaming. Paperspace has two options: one that costs .40 per hour and a .60 per hour. This is really just depends on if you want to run all your games on normal/high to ultra setting for AAA blockbusters. The setup is really quite simple with Paperspace as most of their virtual machines are preloaded for you.
- Create an account. On the website, click on "Billing" and enter one of the promo codes that you found online to get your $10. Next, click on your icon in the top right hand corner and select "Help/Support", click "Submit a Request" in the top right hand corner and fill out the former asking for the GPU options to be unlocked. I just wrote "Need a GPU for a cloud gaming setup." I got a reply within a couple of hours.
- Once you receive your confirmation that the GPU options have become unlocked, click on "Home", "Create a Cloud VM +", select your region (US west, US East, or Europe), select "Windows 10 Dataserver". Next, select "hourly" and choose between the P4000 or the P5000 (as I mentioned above it's the difference between high and ultra graphics).
- For storage, I selected 250 gb because I have quite a few large games that I didn't want to have to download/delete when I wanted to play something else but I think the 100 gb option would have been fine. I don't think that I would recommend the 50 gb option. Note: you can not change your storage later and if you want to upgrade or downgrade, you'll have to create a new virtual machine. Not a big deal, just something to keep in mind.
- Deselect "Autosnapshot", and click "Create Your Paperspace". You are Done. You can connect to your virtual machine through an SSH client like Terminal in Linux or Mac or SSH in Windows, or you can use the free Parsec client (my preference).
Parsec: cost - 3.5-4/5, setup 5/5. You don't get any freebies with this option but it is by far the easiest to setup. You can be up and running in minutes. Download the Parsec client from their website.
- Create an account, open the client, and click on "Play". Select the option that suits you best (I chose the Paperspace P4000 with 250 gb of storage).
- Load the account with 10 dollars, click play and connect to your machine. Done.
Honorable mention: Vortex. I haven't tried it myself, but Vortex looks like another viable option. It requires almost no setup on your part and costs $10 dollars per month. However, it is not a virtual machine and you can only the games that are in their library (100). A lot of the games you get for free through your subscription but other ones you have to buy through, their original client (like Steam). It's not a bad option but it wasn't for me because they didn't have a lot of the games that I was interested in playing.
You can use any controllers that you have with these systems and obviously, since these are virtual machine, you get your entire Steam library. You get to set it up just how you want to and all your games will get stored on the servers (no need to set them up every time), which allows you to game from virtually anywhere with an average connection and a working computer. Just really surprised that this isn't a more talked about option and I thought that maybe it was due to a lack of tutorials.
June 20, 2018 at 11:33AM
