MudMan

I mean, I pulled it from reality. I’m just assessing the way it works for the OP, not representing what you said.

As for Disgaea 4, I do believe that it works for you, the threads on the Steam forums also include people who say it runs for them, along with several who can get it to run by fiddling with Proton versions or doing some combination of launch options, multiple retries and settings changes. But it does have problems. It won’t run at all for me and others report frequent crashes, endless loading screens and other issues. It should definitely not have a Verified rating.

That’s the exception, not the rule, I just mentioned it because you pointed it out and it happens to be one of the games that don’t run universally for everybody.

The weird part of this post is I’ve spent a couple of days trying to get Disgaea 4 to work on my Deck and it really, really doesn’t. I know I’m not alone because the game’s forums have several threads of people complaining about it.

Slightly embarassingly, I also tested it on a Windows ARM device and it ran fine.

Look, compatibility on the Deck is… good for what it is, but it’s certainly nowhere near universal. Especially if you have a big library of games outside Steam, which I do. I’d still say it’s the easy go-to for a casual gamer mostly interested in older single player stuff or indie games, particularly for the price.

It’s good that people have provided workarounds, but it IS kinda nuts that this hasn’t been solved yet. It’s been an issue since day one, it’s not like it makes much sense to leave any version of the Deck with the screen on and full power consumption just so it can download scheduled patches or big games.

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it’s two instances at most, so… I don’t know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It’d pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you’re only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you’re playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that’s the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I’ve done that before for that reason.

I suppose it’s why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.

OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I’d still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I’ve even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.

And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that’s pretty trivial whether it’s inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.

Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.

Yeah, but if you’re this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it’s relartively underpowered? You’ll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.

At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It’s a bit of a problem, actually.

OK, but why?

Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don’t let me stop you.

But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?

For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you’d probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you’re smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.

I know the Dead Cells guys, Motion Twin, are set up as a coop. Not sure about any other major team, and they’ve been pretty open about it only being feasible because they are a small studio.