Stream games from old PC using NAS

[AneeshTheGreat]

I recently strumbled upon the topic of freeNAS, unRAID etc so I was pondering over the fact if I could, potentially, "stream" games from my old desktop PC which has a 1TB HDD in it, from my newer laptop.

Like just use the desktop PC as a storage server for the games but process them on my laptop. Would/ Could a NAS system work for this or are there any other solutions? Somewhat like a reversed Nvidia GeForce Now thing.

 

[Dugimodo]

You might be able to do it if you map a network drive to the local PC and install a game on it, but I wouldn't expect load times to be very good.
For steam it has built in streaming options that use the remote PC to run the game, all you need to do is install steam on both and use the same login.
It works pretty well, I've used a low powered NUC to play racing games on the TV successfully from the gaming PC in another room.

Really though games are designed to run locally for the most part.

 

[bill001g]

That is not really the concept of streaming you are just using the remote machine as a disk drive the games actually runs on your laptop.

It will function well for most games. Then again once you start using SSD for games you get very spoiled by how fast thing load in some games. Running it on a remote server will be slower than the internal drives, how much depends on how fast the drive in your laptop is. Even without the network delay older hard drives are a lot slower than the newer ones.

 

[failboat]

nvidia moonlight can work really well if you want your own geforce now.
one issue is performance will vary on different clients and you really want the clients wired.
my wired nvidia shield as a client gets 3ms latency increase H265. my pixelbook on 2x2 mimo wifi with line of sight gets 17ms increase H265 77ms using H264.

if your laptop doesn't do H265 i don't think it will be smooth. this latency adds onto network latency in game. so if your 50ms in game + 17ms moonlight = 67ms. not factoring in screen latency.

i'd recommend doing it on metal. trying to use KVM will require PCIE passthrough. which is difficult to configure. Linustechtips did passthrough with like 7+ clients before on 1 tower (not moonlight). so it's possible to do more than 1. if you decide to try that route with 2-3 I would recommend only buying it for a fun, expensive, project that might not work. if you can waste even more money on a project like that you can buy a nvidia grid card and not use passthrough. ovirt and esxi support the driver. proxmox might.