Using Clusters for Game Playing

DaBreno

Hi folks, not sure if this is the right forum but just wonderin if anyone has ever tried setting up a Windows cluster specifically for game playing. Ive read examples on the net about using 2 more machine for graphics rendering. I was just wondering if this could be used to play something like Half-life 2 with all the resolution and definition settings turned up to the Max.
Cheers.

PhantomBeaker

It depends on the type of rendering that would be done. For stuff like raytracing you can farm parts of the job out to other machines because time doesn't matter. But if you're doing stuff with HalfLife 2... well that's a different story. You want that game rendering at about 60 frames a second. Now, the graphics hardware is very different from raytracing, because speed matters. So getting that data to the screen as quickly as possible is the aim.

The machine has a hard enough time getting data from the processor to ram to the card fast enough, let alone trying to get it to another machine, which will almost certainly be slower still.

So while farming out raytracing stuff (which wants to do a good job at the expense of speed) will be helped by shoving it onto a cluster (because each machine can take its own sweet time computing it and sending it back), it's unlikely that something relying on projective rendering (which wants speed at the expense of accuracy - remember it wants to be throwing out at least 60fps here, and wants the computations done in time to display the next frame, which is one every 60th of a second) would benefit given that the biggest bottleneck would be the links between the computers on the cluster. The data would possibly take that long to get back to the main computer over the cluster... and then it has to get to ram and to vram.

However, a second graphics card in the same machine typically does help... but that's because the bottleneck of the cluster isn't there.

P.B.

DaBreno

PhantomBeaker wrote:

It depends on the type of rendering that would be done. For stuff like raytracing you can farm parts of the job out to other machines because time doesn't matter. But if you're doing stuff with HalfLife 2... well that's a different story. You want that game rendering at about 60 frames a second. Now, the graphics hardware is very different from raytracing, because speed matters. So getting that data to the screen as quickly as possible is the aim.

The machine has a hard enough time getting data from the processor to ram to the card fast enough, let alone trying to get it to another machine, which will almost certainly be slower still.

So while farming out raytracing stuff (which wants to do a good job at the expense of speed) will be helped by shoving it onto a cluster (because each machine can take its own sweet time computing it and sending it back), it's unlikely that something relying on projective rendering (which wants speed at the expense of accuracy - remember it wants to be throwing out at least 60fps here, and wants the computations done in time to display the next frame, which is one every 60th of a second) would benefit given that the biggest bottleneck would be the links between the computers on the cluster. The data would possibly take that long to get back to the main computer over the cluster... and then it has to get to ram and to vram.

However, a second graphics card in the same machine typically does help... but that's because the bottleneck of the cluster isn't there.

P.B.

Second graphics card looks the way to go. Cheers.

PixelTrawler

What you want is a dual card system ( Nvidia sli or Ati crossfire )
that way you dont have to worry about how the software is farmed out to the cards - the controller will do it...

be prepared to spend though...:)
Check out Alienware for a heart attack! Mind you you could do it cheaper yourself

satchmo

If you're looking for full support for all the latest games then two cards is the way to go alright. But there's also solutions like Chromium which distribute OpenGL-based apps. You won't get Half-Life 2 and the like running, but they've gotten games like Unreal Tournament & Quake III running distributed at 50fps at a resolution of 4096x2304 (12 PCs with screens tiled 4x3) which is pretty cool. It's not all that hard to set up and works pretty well on a regular LAN, although it can be a bit finicky.