Comrades, liberals, and the unaligned misers lend me your eyes.
Computer gaming is increasingly unaffordable, in Australia second hand previous gen GPUs are like a million billion dollars. Games increasingly look like dogshit due to stochastic rendering methods and reliance on advanced lighting methods that require rendering at high resolutions for good performance.
Games are also skyrocketing in price, along with dark patterns becoming ubiquitous. The age of making a good system for 1k aud once every 8 years or so is over. Consequently I am wondering about the economics of a seedbox + renting a high performance server and streaming video games to a cheap minipc that is connected to my TV.
Unfortunately in Australia compute is expensive as hell, and we are far away from places with cheap compute. To the point where light speed limitations means rtts of like 200-300 ms
I’m curious if anyone has experience in similar conditions, either combining a seedbox and high performance computer, or having both and spinning up the HPC when you want to waste some time.
How has it worked out? what genres work and what don’t? has it been cost effective?
If this is stretching the limits of relating to piracy removal won’t offend me. This seems the most relevant, but it is more into hardware and using pirated software (since shit is unaffordable) than piracy directly.
GPUs are expensive everywhere. I’m an Aussie living in the USA and would offer to buy stuff here and ship it to you, but it’s getting to the point where some stuff here is actually more expensive than Australia now, thanks to significantly worse inflation compared to Australia, and the Trump tariffs.
Renting a dedicated server or VDS with a decent GPU would be pretty expensive too. A lot of people are using them for AI, which has caused a lot of price increases as plenty of people are willing to pay a lot for a server with powerful AI capabilities.
I know this is a piracy community, but if you really do want to do online game streaming, a service like GeForce Now would end up quite a bit cheaper even after factoring in the cost of games. Their highest tier (which comes with a GTX4080 and 16 vCPUs) is $20/month which is significantly cheaper than what it’d cost to rent a similarly specced system.
Consider testing servers that are located in Singapore, especially if you use Optus or if your ISP uses Optus as one of their upstreams.
If you’re lucky, your ISP will route from Australia directly to Singapore and you’ll get around 100-120ms ping, about half what you’d get compared to a US-based server. If you’re unlucky, it’ll be 400+ms, routing to the USA then from the USA to Singapore.
Yeah it sucks. Between crypto and machine learning hardware is absolutely fucked. I’m hoping it’ll settle down a bit when people realise that llm’s are not going to make god from a machine but we shall see.
Hadn’t considered Singapore, assumed it’d be expensive since land is and they’re rich as fuck. I guess power is cheap since their billionaires are taking all the gas here and selling it back haha. Compute seems relatively affordable for a RTT of 110 ms.
Probably rules out like fighting games and other similar frame perfect stuff but that’s definitely not too bad. 6 frame delay probably isn’t noticeable on anything turn based, or many RPGs and the like.
110ms is absolutely noticeable in anything interactive, ie menus and shit, if it is bad enough that you care is a matter of personal preference, I would test before committing any substantial amount of money into this.
Hosting in Singapore is definitely more expensive than the USA or Germany, but cheaper than Australia or New Zealand. It’s often a good compromise for web hosting companies since you get good connectivity not just to Australia but to the rest of Asia too (compared to hosting in Australia where you only really get good connectivity to people in Australia).