Graphic Cards Critical Hardware Resources for games

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john_avi

Disciple
I am not sure whether to put this question in this forum or some other sub-forum. Because of confidentiality i can't reveal the exact application but I can give some info about the core of it. we are preparing a game server where more than 1 games will be run simultaneously. There will be many such servers. As soon as a request for new game launch comes, we'll start it on available game server.

What I have to do is design an application which will monitor the current system resources usage of a game server(PC with high gaming capabilities) and decide on which machine next game request should be sent.

As far as I know, there are 3 important hardware resources (RAM, GPU and CPU) which affect the performance of game. If I check their utilisation and find that some XYZ system has enough resources, we'll send the request to that XYZ system.

I want to know apart from these 3 resources are there any other resources which may affect the game's performance?

If yes then pls tell me what are those resources?

P.S - Mod. if you find that this question belongs to some other sub-forum, pls shift it to that forum.
 
Well, here:

1. 4GB RAM for PC gamers(even 2GB is fine, computer slows down afterwards)

2. An INTEL Hyperthreaded DUAL CORE is great, low end quad core if you plan to game at MAX settings and Full HD resolution

3. High END GPU

THat's what I followed

4GB RAM

AMD Athlon II X4

HD5850

When I bought my PC
 
We have already setup the machine, it's having capability to run games. What I have to do is -

- get the current resource utilization data (ram usage, gpu usage,......some more which I want to know from experts) of this machine

- on the basis of resource utiliazation data, I have to decide whether this machine can run another game instance or not

- if it can afford to run another game flawlessly then start the game else go to some other game which has the required resources.

I hope it clears my point. If not then pls let me know I'll elaborate more on this.
 
I'm no hardware expert but running a single instance of Crysis 2 at Full HD resolution is pretty resource intensive. I suggest you keep a look on the ingame FPS.
 
john_avi said:
so how to know whether system has enough resources to run another game. What are the parameters on the basis of which I can decide whether I can run another game simultaneously or not? What data can be criteria?
Click to expand...

RAM,CPU,GPU usage & temperature statistics. Even if you have successfully launched two games on the same PC you should check whether they are running smoothly by monitoring the FPS on each game.
 
The games which you've mentioned are highly resource intensive ones, 12 GB RAM won't make any difference. If you are planning to host more than one game on a single server then you should be looking at something beyond 32 GB RAM. Besides CPU,GPU & MEMORY, you should be looking at the network bandwidth. The network bandwidth & NIC Cards(atleast 2-4 NIC Cards) may prove to be a huge bottleneck, if you don't pay proper attention. Since you'll be getting multiple requests for running several instances of one or more games in a single server, your NIC card should be capable enough to handle all the incoming/outgoing traffic. If you've more than one NIC card you can do TEAMING and distribute the network traffic among all the NIC Cards. Also, your network connectivity should support gigabit ethernet atleast, so as to ensure a lag-free performace at decent frame rates to the end user.
 
Can you explain how you plan to use the GPU for multiple instances of same or different games?

What you have outlined makes sense if you are running multiple instances of game servers, which will require only RAM and CPU monitoring.
 
I'll suggest to keep a check on the Disk throughput as well.

I don't have much knowledge about game servers. But common sense tells me that you shouldn't require a top of the line GPU to host a game assuming there wouldn't be any individual display for each game running on that server. I may be wrong though.

#[member='pr0ing'] You can run multiple games on a single GPU if you have the necessary CPU&RAM unless you want to play each games simultaneously which is impossible on a single display unless windowed. Although I wonder how would the GPU processing be distributed for running multiple games on a single machine with multi-GPU multi-monitor setup.
 
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