Installing games on a network location.

badwhitevision

badwhitevision

Forerunner
This has been a long time doubt of mine.

Right now, I download the ISO onto my NAS, then copy it over to my PC, install it and play. If instead, I decided to install the game at a network location and play it off the network location, how bad would my loading time/playing experience be?

Provided -
1. I use 2.5 GbE ethernet all round.
2. The NAS is a SATA SSD.

I dont play competitively or even online. I mostly only play single player games with a storyline or the like and I'm only now coming to titles released in the early 2010s.

The internet doesn't seem to be helpful. There were mentions about an LTT video on this topic, but I can't seem to find it.

Thank you.
 
I think this might be the LTT video you're referring to? Albeit this is more about being able to install the games quickly.

I don't fully understand what you're trying to say though. It sounds like you're asking about remote pc gaming?
 
enthusiast29 said:
One word, Horrible!
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ibose said:
Why, oh why ?
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Personally, I don't see it being a bad idea, since OP just plays single player games that too from the last decade. The theoretical speed of 2.5 GbE is almost the same as two hard drives in RAID 0, which is a respectable speed and many people use that for bulk storage of games (including Jake from LTT). Although it would be slower than a native install, but most of the difference is just in loading times and once the games is up and running it should be just fine. And since OP has mentioned his NAS has SATA SSDs, there shouldn't be a bottleneck from the NAS side and he could easily saturate the 2.5GbE. Heck, till 2021 I just gamed from a Hard drive and for most of the part it was completely fine, as long as you have realistic expectations.
 
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@Rezep thank you for the link. However,the game caching server seems to be something where the game is downloaded (but not installed) onto the server and then multiple people connect to it (as a steam library) and then they download the game from the local server and install it on their PCs instead of connecting to Steam directly and overloading the WAN connection.

My concern was more of attempting to install a game to a network location like it was a HDD plugged into my computer and play games.

@enthusiast29 Concise and to the point. Thank you :tearsofjoy:

@ibose It was just a random thought about how much you could push the limit.

I mean I used to play GTA 5 on a 2.5 inch HDD (Laptop) with a poor graphic card without much latency with a decent playable experience and the max those HDDs could spin were 100-110 MB/s. 3.5inch HDDs used to spin at 200-230 MB/s.

So considering a 2.5 GbE connection can accomodate the bandwidth of a 3.5 inch HDD, I was wondering what other things would have to be considered for this to become a reality.

I am not planning on doing it anytime soon (or at all). Just curious.

Cheers.
 
Last edited:
badwhitevision said:
If instead, I decided to install the game at a network location and play it off the network location, how bad would my loading time/playing experience be?
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The question really is, why? What are you trying to achieve by doing this? If you have 2.5 Gbit ethernet games will get copied in a minute or so. If you install at network location, the game will still be copied temporarily to your PC for extraction. Gameplay experience will be horrible. So what's the objective here?
 
gourav said:
If you install at network location, the game will still be copied temporarily to your PC for extraction. Gameplay experience will be horrible. So what's the objective here?
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They won't be copied to a secondary storage space (hard drives or SSDs). Accessing a file from network storage copies it to the primary storage (RAM) and then runs it. If the RAM overflows then it's dumped to secondary storage.

In addition to the above,
@badwhitevision The reason of horrible performance would be the CPU overhead of accessing the files over the network and the extra RAM utilization.
Do not underestimate the CPU overhead of copying files over network at those gigabit speeds. Playing small indie games might be OK but games like GTA5 won't run smooth at all.
 
enthusiast29 said:
They won't be copied to a secondary storage space (hard drives or SSDs). Accessing a file from network storage copies it to the primary storage (RAM) and then runs it.
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The network speed is limited to 2.5 gbit, so the destination is hardly going to make a difference. Also, most modern games are 70-80 GB. Who has that much RAM.
 
I don't think loading times would be that much worse. Last I checked, the number of games that actually took advantage of nvme speeds and used tech like Direct Storage were just a handful. And since random read/write speeds matter much more than sequential, the 2.5 gbe connection should be more than enough for that.

I would bet that loading times only change by 10-30% compared to local, especially for a SATA ssd. You should try it and post the results. :)

Also, OP has 2.5 gbe presumably builtin on his motherboard, I would guess that his CPU is fast/recent enough that it won't affect performance.
 
Thank you guys.!!

It was like I said, just a curious doubt and not something I hoped to incorporate in my setup currently.

TIL how SMB works by copying to RAM and secondary storage. I can see how the experience would degrade as the playing duration increased (even if I had tons of RAM)

@variablevector If I ever do this, I shall make sure to post an update here with how things work out. :D
 
I guess on that video it was like that there were few VM and each had connectivity with separate keyboard and mouse and i guess they tried it on gpu based VM as it was faster. I guess it's useful only when there are multiple users and someone wants only a single system for everyone but it will require more cpu cores too.
It maybe a good learning but not practical for a single user. But yeah fun thing to do if having lot of time.
 
my experience has been OK. have the steam games on iSCI on NAS. The games work fine without issues but load times are little low. Few games have issues, like Horizon which crashes after loading.
 
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