0

I have my own private server setup, albeit old pentium 3 units they each hold 1/2 gb ram and about 900mhz over 10units, each has 80gb hdds....they are outdated stock from a large company but are server modules,each preloaded with windows 2000 and various software I have no clue about....

I am wondering if I could make use of this old hardware to function as an external graphics decoder or something like that so I could play games (like fallout 4) on my older hardware. I have heard of cluster computing and am not sure how hard such a setup would be, though I have seen videos of making clusters of rasberry pi units and figure the process would be about the same especially as the units are identical... id like to know if there is any way to make this work before spending hours trying to confugure everything and only having a basic understanding of how to build the cluster itself not to mention the functionallity it could offer me...I have heard steam was getting ready to launch a service where the game was cloud processed...and my understanding of graphics cards is they typically offer many cores and ram which id plan to be replacing with nodes.... im sure this setup would be far from efficient hauling in apx 20kw/hr...im just trying to figure out first if it can be done and if so how hard would it be and what options may be best for this type of setup...

Burgi
  • 6,493
  • 14
  • 39
  • 52
Firobug
  • 103
  • 4
  • We have a large number of near duplicates for this and they all say the same thing: modern computer programs are still not very parallelized and Operating systems are not designed to share task *threads* between machines. Even if they were the time critical nature of gaming would make this utterly painful at best. http://superuser.com/questions/165134 http://superuser.com/questions/226584 http://superuser.com/questions/1047607 – Mokubai Jun 05 '16 at 18:02
  • My favourite answer would be this one: http://superuser.com/a/226603/19943 – Mokubai Jun 05 '16 at 18:03
  • Your understanding of graphics cards is also naïve. Graphics cards offer hundreds to thousands of highly specialised cores that can perform a massive number of tasks in parallel, their benefit in gaming comes from their being able to do them both fast and in sheer quantity. Neither of those qualities can be found in old hardware on a janky slow ethernet link. They can process tens of gigabytes per second to produce the images you see, home ethernet can manage maybe a gigabit, which would be more than 80 times less than your graphics card. Processors are also slower at graphics card tasks. – Mokubai Jun 05 '16 at 18:09
  • The steam service is almost certainly going to be the same as every other game streaming service, when they play the game remotely, send you the film of it playing and then let you use your machine as a glorified remote desktop. It is not "cloud processing" so much as "a cloud of remote desktop gaming machines". In all honesty though, if you want to play games by far your easiest option is to sell all those machines and buy a single decent one. – Mokubai Jun 05 '16 at 18:15

0 Answers0