Home computing for $5/month

Re:Home computing for $5/month by pault on Thursday August 17, 2017 @03:40PM (#15040125)

I have an absurdly expensive MacBook for work, and I thought about building a gaming rig but didn't want to drop the ~$3k to get it (yes, I could build one for cheaper but I get carried away when I'm shopping and have a weakness for best-in-class components). I started looking into AWS gaming (very disappointing performance) and discovered paperspace, which has p5000 and p6000 16GB dedicated GPU instances. I think it's about $0.60/hr and I end up spending about $30/mo on my weekend gaming binges. I have 1000Mb google fiber (sorry) so YMMV if you have constrained bandwidth, but the p5000 is beastly and it has easily brushed aside every game I've thrown at it with ultra settings at 1440p (the parsec streaming client I use is capped at 1440p or I'd be running it at 2160p). Eventually the costs will catch up with me, but in the meantime I can't think of a good reason to buy my own hardware (aside from the urge to tinker). Obviously for personal computing I feel differently but for a gaming machine paperspace is very convenient. No affiliation, I'm just super happy with the product.

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Re:Home computing for $5/month by chadgeidel on Thursday August 17, 2017 @04:16PM (#15040492)

Can you point to any writeups about this? The cost is low enough that I could just try it myself, but I do have one question about "controller support." I play PC Racing sims - I wonder about the support for wheel/pedals.

I'm assuming VR is out of the question due to the latencies.

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Re:Home computing for $5/month by pault on Thursday August 17, 2017 @04:29PM (#15040651)

Parsec supports controllers: https://faq.parsec.tv/articles/10080-setting-up-your-control...

I don't think VR is supported, and yeah, even a low ping would make it a vomit comet anyway.

Here's the pricing: https://www.paperspace.com/pricing You have to sign up and then request access to the GPU instances (each instance type has to be requested individually, unfortunately. I found the GPU+ instance to be a little underpowered, and the P5000 has been performant enough that I haven't bothered to try the P6000). I can take up to 24 hours to get access. Once you have that though, you can create an instance with the parsec image and it comes with all the drivers, as well as steam and EA origin pre-installed. The parsec client by default starts up without admin mode, which crashes a lot in my experience, so I log in using the browser client and restart the parsec server as admin manually. It's basically ready to go out of the box and the longest part of the setup is just waiting for your steam games to install.

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Re:Home computing for $5/month by boxerbk on Friday August 18, 2017 @04:20PM (#15049412)

You can just go to parsec.tv/account. You don't have to use the paperspace website at all with parsec anymore. I'm the cofounder of parsec btw

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Re:Home computing for $5/month by pault on Friday August 18, 2017 @04:26PM (#15049457)

Awesome! Do you have an ETA for 4k support? Also, which instance types can be launched from parsec? Awesome software BTW!

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Re:Home computing for $5/month by chadgeidel on Thursday August 17, 2017 @07:01PM (#15041861)

Thank you!

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Re:Home computing for $5/month by icebraining on Friday August 18, 2017 @05:36AM (#15044777)

Interesting, thanks! I got an eGPU adapter to try to play without having to buy a full desktop, since I'd have to sell it in a few months, but I still haven't got it to work. This sounds like a nice alternative. Shame they only have US-based DCs, not sure the latency will be low enough.

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