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.
Obviously this is antithetical to this community, but when Stadia was a thing, it was actually really amazing. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 on release day with a shit PC blew me away. I’m not sure how it worked in Australia, but the lag was only noticeable sometimes, and never was a distraction or took away from the game play. GeForce Now is ok, but they need to support your game, and then you need to purchase the game + have a subscription. I know Stadia got a lot of shit, and also had a limited catalog, but it actually got me to buy cutting edge games, sometimes on release day, with no subscription.
For me, piracy is not about cost, but more for combating anti-consumer behavior by corporations. Say what you will about Google, but Stadia was actually a good product. I guess it’s just good they killed it before they could enshitify it.
Stadia was amazing, and would likely still be around if not for Phil Harrison. I have fond memories of unloading my Whisper of the Worm into the Scourge of the Past raid boss with my Destiny 2 clan, from my phone, on the toilet.
There’s something so poetic in the way you write.
Counterpoint; it required gigabit internet and still had noticable delay to my eyes. It also had compression artifacts as well as low-medium graphics settings. It also hitched semi-regularly for no apparent reason.
All the above meant that stadia was only good for people with the money to spend on it and located in an area with fast internet and didn’t play any FPSes. It was too many requirements to be a popular thing, kinda like VR is.
It also suffered from the “games get removed straight from my library” problem. They also couldn’t support every game, or even the bare minimum if most popular right now, simply because they had to make sure it’s supported on their backend.
It should have stuck around, but I don’t think it would be a big thing until much later when internet is actually decent in most places, instead of a very select few.
Stadia was actually a good product
That’s how Google decides which ones to kill off.
Well, they do hate their customers after all
Since Google has infinite money they probably ran local compute.
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.
To the point where light speed limitations means rtts of like 200-300 ms
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).
I’m curious on the responses as potential long term strategy to stay in this hobby without financial ruin, but frankly I just got more creative sourcing parts.
Aliexpress mobile CPU frankensteined onto desktop micro ATX. Staying with 1440p. Buying used parts. Last gen GPU for 1440p has been fine. But that’s Canada, I know Australia is even worse off with tech prices.
Tell me more of this frankencomputer.
I’m not broke by any means, but lower end of average household income in an extremely expensive place. Groceries have gone up about 4 fold in the last 5 years (50 bucks used to feed 2 for a week, lol lmao now. Beans went from 3 dollars a kg dry to 11 etc) so certain things are on the chopping block.
I was looking at the cost for a “2k” oled monitor and appropriate computer and haha, hahaha, hahahahahahahaha I have medical bills and shit lmao. Not paying like 3-5k to play the 1 or 2 increasingly bad modern games I want to.
Craft Computing on YouTube does these videos semi-regularly as well. Makes something from weird and cheap parts and then gives the results of how well it works or doesn’t, as well as what quirks you take as trade. For example; https://youtube.com/watch?v=VTWaRBcOsBE
There’s bazillion of these videos, but here’s a good recent one (with benchmark) about the Frankenboards that’s under 10 min:
It’s not the same of course, but Cost of Living is a disaster here too, it’s why the youth are moving rightwards probably dooming us too unless Carney turns this shit show around.
