Selfhosted

The technology has "been there" for a while, it's trivial do setup what you're asking for, the issue is that games have anti cheat engines that will get triggered by the virtualization and ban you.

I bought a cheap used Dell R710 on Facebook marketplace for like $100 or so, as well as an ups, rack, 10g switch, etc, from various other sellers. All told, I’ve got about $500 in my server setup.

Installed proxmox on it. It’s “free” if you don’t buy a license. You just have to put up with a little nag screen when you open the control panel but it still works 100%, much like winrar.

Works great.

Edit: just realized this is in c/selfhosted AND I misunderstood the post. I’m gonna leave it here just on the off chance it’s useful to somebody, but I acknowledge it’s not what you’re looking for.

You're not really describing your use-case here. Are you just trying to run a server that does all your rendering for you so you can play games elsewhere? Yes, that's totally possible.

If you're trying to describe a business...no, it's not possible, scalable, or profitable.

I'm curious as to what your intentions are here though.

I've also wanted to do this for a while, but there were always a few too many barriers to actually spin up the project. Here's just a brain dump of things I've seen recently.

vGPUs continue to be behind a license. But there is now vgpu_unlock.

L1T just showed off PCIe "fabric" from Liqid that can switch physical devices between machines.

Turning VMs on and off isn't as slick as either of the above, but that is doable today. You'll just have to build all the switching automation yourself. That could just be a shell script running QEMU/libvirt commands, at a minimum.

I’ve been doing exactly that at home for a couple years now. First with Parsec, now Sunshine/Moonlight.

Host is Proxmox on Ryzen 5800x, 64gm RAM GPU is 2070 Super, with VGPU patched drivers from https://gitlab.com/polloloco/vgpu-proxmox

When I’m gaming I’ll dedicate the full 8Gb to my windows Vm, otherwise I split it in 2 or 4Gb chunks to Jellyfin or my home camera monitoring. 8gb can’t split very many ways, and most things require at least 2 to run.

Locally at home I can run 1440p 60fps rock solid over wifi on any device, from my phone/old laptop/apple tv/raspberry pi. Remote I can do 1080p60, but a bit more hit or miss depending on my network connection.

Experimenting with LLMs I’ve done through the same windows VM, or to a ubuntu dev VM. Works the same way. I’m thinking of transitioning my gaming VM to Linux too.

The amount of VRAM is the hard limitation to get past, the virtualization tech itself has been there for a while.

But to be perfectly honest……it really was just a “let’s see if I could do this” type task, direct GPU pass though is more straightforward and it’s not really worth splitting 8Gb these days. Unless you get a card with significantly more VRAM passthrough is much less work.

I've recently tried to do that using sunsine and different linux gaming distros and it was awful, the VM was working great for a few minutes and then suddenly crashes and I have to hard stop it.

All the people that I've seen talking about it on the internet are using Windows VMs so I guess that I'm doing something wrong or the only way to do it is through a Windows VM, which I'll not even try.