whoa hey no that's not how you do it
geez i don't think nzxt sponsored this video
so we could chop up their hardware
they sponsored it so we can show you guys how to take a single gaming rig
like this build pc and split it into two or even more virtual gaming machines so
you and a couple buds can pool together and share a single
working GPU even if not everyone can get their
hands on their own graphics card super cool right
let's show you how it works
splitting a GPU used to be a huge challenge for a number of reasons first
and foremost being that NVIDIA didn't want you to you see NVIDIA locked down
the ability to virtualize their consumer gpus taking one physical card and
dividing it up into multiple virtual ones and for years they have only
allowed this functionality on their workstation and data center cards like
the quadro tesla and grid series these artificial software limitations
have allowed NVIDIA to price those other cards vastly higher than their GeForce
options and remember how i said there were a number of reasons there weren't
NVIDIA kept you from sharing your GPU resources because they wanted to charge
more for the capabilities shocker i know but we've got a trick up our
sleeves today everyone's favorite Windows specifically Windows 11 and some
fancy tech called para virtualization para virtualization differs from
standard virtualization by communicating directly with the hypervisor using
drivers rather than through hardware level calls so while spinning up a
virtual machine or a vm setting up the hardware and software and actually
getting to a workable vm used to take a lot of skill and time
the key word there is used to thanks to a cute little script aptly
named easy gpup p is for partitioning
which was written by one of parsec's developers almost all of the work of
setting up a Windows vm is done for you it divvies up your hardware installs
your os and drivers and of course installs parsec but that's not just
because they want to shield their software it's kind of the secret sauce
that makes this whole thing work but before we get to that we need to talk
about the limitations of the setup but the most important one being hardware
outputs while the virtual machines we create are
able to borrow our GPU's processing power and its onboard memory they cannot
borrow the physical display outputs think of it kind of like this we can
slice our GPU up this way where one of the virtual machines ends up with all of
the outputs but we can't slice it up this way where each one gets its own
output that is where parsec's cloud gaming software comes into play it's able to
snag an encoded video feed from each of our vms and then stream it to a
different device like a low-powered pc a
macbook or even a phone before we can even think about splitting
a GPU up though we're gonna need to get one fortunately our friends over at nzxt
build sent over a sweet pre-built system that is absolutely perfect for this kind
of use case it's got a ryzen 9 5950x 16
core processor and a near top of the line rtx 3080 ti
of course you can check out this rig at the link down below but you don't need specs like this to be
able to do this we tested a handful of modern gpus with really amazing results
though your mileage may vary and one thing to note is that you must split
your GPU's video memory evenly between each vm so if your GPU is light on vram
you may have issues gaming on more than a couple of vms since we're starting
with two vms and one of these 3080 ti's
that's gonna give us six gigs each now regular system memory can be divided
up any way you like just like with regular vms but since we've got a total
of 32 gigs of RAM and most modern games are asking for eight gigs or more we're
gonna divide them up with eight gigs per via now we'll get into more details
later but for now we've got hyper-v manager open on our monitor but
very funny by deskpad ltdstore.com so
hyper-v manager open on our monitor we're going to go ahead and fire up a
couple of our vms here we've got GPU p1
and GPU p2 for player 1 and player 2.
each of these was configured with four of our 16 ryzen cores and as i mentioned
before eight gigs of RAM fortunately the parsec script that we
linked in the description did all the heavy lifting leaving us with just
games to install here we are yay
but before we fire them up we've got a couple of housekeeping items to take care of first and foremost is the fact
that these Windows are limited to 1080p resolution which doesn't sound like a
huge problem until you remember that the 3080 ti in this machine is capable of
way higher resolutions than that that
is where cheap little displayport or HDMI dummy plugs like these ones come in
even though we can't actually use the physical ports on our GPU to plug into a
monitor for each vm if you plug these in they can trick the
GPU into thinking that a monitor is connected which actually unlocks the
resolution selector in Windows so we go ahead and set that to 4k on each of our
vms and it's time to see how a 3080 ti
handles two concurrent 4k gaming sessions
it's pretty cool right if you want to mirror it to both one and
two then we can get a display here so people can see it sure i can do that
first i'm going to set it to 3840x2160
duplicate is not an option no interesting well um i guess you won't be
peeking into what we're doing from over there let's for the first time in my
life run two games at once on the same GPU on two separate machines colin you
can be my counter-strike friend i am only at 1080p right right right right
we'll get to the we'll get you the real performance numbers later the developer ran into a bit of a weird
issue where for whatever reason that one vm is not
able to do 4k uh but he's replicated on
his side he's working on it okay this is not the most amazing performance ever
but i'm at 60fps oh it's going david
it'd be like whoa dawg what is this two
games running at once oh someone's spawn
camping us yeah they're all spawn camping us how rude come on it's
counter-strike what'd you expect yeah that's fair i'm going back to 1080p okay
we got a match to win here colin sure fair i mean i'm getting like 200 FPS
yeah i want more like that my game is dead
i'm gone steam is closed why did you do this and it's beautiful here
terrible there oh yeah don't look at that and think
that that is representative of the gaming experience at all hey still i got
two kills okay okay but we're playing video games we're playing video games on
one GPU and one CPU and we're both getting like 150 to 200 FPS yes
david does this blow your mind yeah yeah he just shot me direct like
straight through the door yeah but he could see like like he was
tracking me i swear hax hacks question for you then in total we're
getting about 400 FPS between the two of us on that GPU so running a single
instance at 1080p what were we getting i only ran it at 4k balls well but at 4k
we're getting 462 FPS so theoretically assuming that we are
still CPU limited i have no idea i just don't
even know what to expect from this like when you split the GPU across multiple workloads in a
game like cs go where you're typically CPU rather than GPU bound could you
potentially end up with more FPS's or less fpss
it looks like a little bit less right now
given that we're running 1080p but
what if we were to split it more ways
would it scale better or worse we can find out i guess we can as
impressive as it is that this is running at all i'm sure what you really want to know is
objectively speaking how well is it running right so right now we're getting
anywhere from 350 to 400 FPS shared between the two of
us right so how does that compare to running this same card
but just in a single instance on bare metal
even though we only have one of these running at 4k right now we've actually
got some numbers for you so cs go on a
single 3080 ti managed about
460 FPS average then with our 50 vm so this is half of a
3080 ti we managed 175 FPS so it looks
like we actually do get less than half
of the performance the scaling is not perfect which is i have to admit not
quite what i expected csgo being a mostly CPU-bound game i would have
thought would allow our GPU to stretch its legs more but who knows maybe we're
not dividing it up enough we've got more demos right we do got
more demos all right let's try let's try something new yeah i know i'm averaging
like 50 FPS even in fairly busy parts of town 40
dipped down to 40. my 99th percentile is like 25
that is absolutely playable in a game like this so to be
clear anno 1800 not the world's most
demanding game but it's also not the
world's easiest to run game like this all this is all very reasonable 80
degree hotspot like fine yeah that thing's not working that hard actually
so dual cs goes is for whatever reason
heavier than dual anodes
is that because
the CPU is scaling really well in cs go
and making it so hold on i got to win lunch so GPU usage is right up around 70
75 i'm surprised it's not just pinning it i
wonder if the host vm is using some of it could be
clearly it works and all things considered it was actually pretty easy
to set up colin here who set up and wrote this video has literally never
touched hyper-v yet he was able to get this up and
running in a couple of hours so what does it take to do it well apart
from what we've already mentioned you're going to need a pro or enterprise
version of Windows 10 or Windows 11. we would suggest the latter as it is a bit
easier you start by downloading the files from the easy gpup github and extracting them
to your desktop then you grab the latest drivers for your GPU from NVIDIA's
website directly now comes the most important step you
need to enable virtualization both in the BIOS
and in Windows now on most systems you'll find the BIOS
settings under CPU settings and they'll either be called svm mode on AMD or
Intel vtx on well Intel
save and reset and once you're back into Windows hit the Windows key and type
turn Windows features on or off scroll down to hyper-v and enable
everything inside and reboot your pc while it's booting by the way why not
hit the subscribe button we've got a lot more cool Windows 11 content planned
like running it on a phone now that our operating system is set up
properly we can run the easy gpup scripts because it's possible that these
steps will change i'm going to refer you to the github page to find the latest
information and if you get stuck the linustechtips.com forum is a great
resource once you configure your script you can rerun it over and over to keep
making vms just make sure to change the vm name each time before creating
another and remember that NVIDIA limits the number of concurrent end bank
encoding streams to three on their consumer graphics cards meaning the
practical player limit is four one local and three remote ones
if you did everything right in hyper-v manager you should see your new vms just
like we saw earlier you double click the vm to boot it up and then you can
install your games and configure parsec now all that's left is for us to go
ahead and make three vms each with four
CPU cores 25 of our GPU and eight gigs
of RAM to see if we can run four gamers off this single CPU and GPU
which which one is alt is it command is that command is win key oh it's got to
be option okay um
i think we might just have to lose the macbook it was a funny meme but uh we're
just we're having this game we're having some issues hey
macbook works oh heck yeah i got my LTT
crew it's Linus and the Linus tech tips
okay that's a cue Mac Address you know and it's like you're the little brother
and he's just holding the controller but not actually doing anything yeah this is
what i feel like right now i think we're doing it guys oh i'm playing oh i got
one wait i killed ltd benchmark tertiary
we're not all on the same team so we're actually getting a grand total
of around 300 frames per second does that sound about right to y'all jeff's
experience being on like native is clearly better uh yeah that looks a
little more responsive because i'm i'm getting a lot of chop on
my own look like that wow oh let's go
yeah with only a quarter of the GPU he's still getting like 150 180 FPS
GPU's definitely working harder than it was with anno right now though
you know what though i actually don't think it's working as hard as it was with two instances of cs go can you all
tab for a sec whoa GPU core load is 98
i lied i think the fan's just running heavier okay
remember guys not only is it running four instances of the game but it's also
running four instances of NVIDIA's hardware and coding oh there's a guy
there and theoretically that hardware encoder
is sort of separate hardware but in practice it does put additional strain
on the GPU it does produce additional heat when it's operating and so it can
affect your overall performance so how do i change guns so press b to
buy guns oh yeah what's to buy yeah you
have to buy guns i mean logically imagine what this would be capable of if
NVIDIA allowed us to access them locally
rather than remotely you could have a single gaming machine in the middle of a
big table and just have four separate sets of peripherals hooked up to it and
all be playing a game off the same hardware that's freaking incredible
but the 3080ti is pretty expensive what
if we tried it with something more reasonable like a 2070 super we did
and as long as you're only gonna play fairly light games things like rocket
league it's actually surprisingly usable as well
though there are some things to note about this setup if you're going to try
it for real hardware that crazy like top of the line is not
strictly necessary but it definitely helps and perhaps even more important is
your network speed parsec suggests having an upload speed of over 50
megabit per second if you plan on hosting two or more vms over the
internet and even if you're running locally you will need a directly wired
connection wi-fi or mesh networking might have the throughput for modern
applications like 4k netflix or what have you but their latency is not nearly
good enough for this you may also encounter some black
screens with Windows security prompts and stuff like that so having parsec
access to the host as well as the vms is a good idea so you'll be able to squash
those little interruptions another thing is you should definitely
temper your performance expectations as we found 400 FPS on bare metal
absolutely does not result in four times 100 FPS on four vms you'll also need a
Windows license for each of your vms definitely don't just spin up a new one
whenever your license expires another thing to discuss is the cost
you're absolutely saving some money using a single machine to run four
instances instead of four separate machines you only need one case you only
need one power supply you only even really need one SSD
but it should be noted that you're going to end up shelling out for higher
quality hardware versus if you only had to run a single client workload say take
the SSD for example if you were to use a
basic basic qlc SSD with no dram cache
you could get away with that for a single gaming machine you try to have
four clients working off of that thing at the same time you're gonna have an
extremely bad time and the same goes for a power supply never mind just the
wattage that it's rated to output but let's talk about the duty cycle
manufacturers when they warranty these things when they decide about how long
they expect them to last they have an expectation for how many hours a year
you're probably going to have it running and how hard it's going to be hit as we
discovered with all four of our gamers hitting that 3080 ti it is pinned at 100
usage these and other components like your motherboard or a mini core CPU are
things that you would want to consider when you're configuring your system with someone like of course nzxt who is the
sponsor of this video so in conclusion this is a really cool and novel use of
parsec it's normally used to have a friend remote in to play a multiplayer
game or to stream games from your home pc to another of your own devices kind
of like having your own private cloud gaming service but here you're turning
it into all of you and your friends private
cloud gaming service which is a seriously legitimate possible use case
for it especially in these troubled times now in addition to performance
drops though you'll experience additional connection latency about a
frame on a local network and a couple of frames on a remote one and you'll be
giving up some image quality even a high bitrate hevc stream is going to have
more blocking and artifacts than a hardwired displayport connection
especially if you crank your frame rate past 60. but i'm super excited for the
future of this kind of technology and i think it's an awesome little project that they created over there so go give
them some love all right if you enjoyed this video go check out six workstations
one CPU or seven gamers one CPU for an example of doing this with actually very
little performance drawback because we loaded up the system with gpus back when
you could actually find them okay who just killed me
rude rude