Like you, I am not a gamer, data center, technical/data computing kind of a guy.
I got fanless MSI GT 1030 for $70 before Christmas for a kid gaming on Ubuntu + Steam playing everything he wants just fine (some multiplayer shooter games - Rust is one of them). I got the card for these reasons - good enough, not overpriced (useless for mining) and it is the only GT ... with display port. It just works, no trouble whatsoever on Ubuntu 16.04 with the latest Nvidia drivers. So far everyone is very happy with it. I can recommend it. In regards to your server room VM setup idea - how are you planning to display the stuff from far away server room? It will be pretty much useless for gaming unless you can connect it disectly to a monitor, keyboard an mouse. Vnc is too slow even for Minecraft .... and will probably bypass your graphics card too. Best luck, Tomas On Feb 17, 2018 6:24 PM, "Tyrell Jentink" <tyr...@jentink.net> wrote: Hello all, I am not a gamer... But I have games I like. Luckily, one of my favorite game franchises, Unreal Tournament, has a long history of Linux support. The latest game engine in the Unreal lineup, Unreal Engine 4, is open source... Proprietary, covered by restrictive terms, but available to the public without licensing fees... So "Open" none the less. And it compiles on Linux. OK, but here's the "Weird" part: I'm a Linux server admin, not a gamer... I have servers with many times the processor and RAM resources I need, but I don't have any modern desktop hardware. All my IT resources go to the server farm, because that's what benefits the family most, and I have no IT budget. SO, I am going for the illustrious and ever elusive Virtual Gaming Computer... Virtualizing (probably) Ubuntu in a KVM virtual machine, passing the graphics card directly into the VM using PCI passthrough, and give it 12 virtual processor cores and 24GB of RAM, and see what it can do... But, I need a graphics card. I am looking for a gaming graphics card to play Unreal Tournament 4 with. It doesn't have to be the latest and greatest, in fact even devices as old as the Radeon 6870 HD and the GeForce 470 GTX meet Epic Game's requirements. It does need to fit in a server case, but that doesn't necessarily mean low profile; They plug into a riser board, but I'm sure bigger cards exist that won't fit; it probably shouldn't be PCI-E x16 (I have the channels available, but I would need a different riser board... x8 would just be easier to deal with), it doesn't need to be a workhorse, but it should probably have 2GB of RAM and a fairly wide memory interface, and it should support DirectX 12 (As a baseline, not as a direct requirement... I'm obviously not using DirectX in Linux). Meanwhile, as a virtualization environment, the board will be rendering the graphics and passing them back to the main CPU, rather than passing them to a display... so memory and interface speed is a priority over caring about output types or counts, my lack of PCI-E channels not withstanding. I think these requirements eliminate most of the newest high end cards... And most of the lower end cards... But should leave room in slightly older high end cards... The kind gamers would be getting rid of. Also, the kind that have recently been rendered useless for Etherum mining. A quick search on Newegg suggests some of the lower end GeForce GT 1030s and the like can be had sub-$150 and will likely meet my needs... But are also a bit more than I hoped to spend. I know that the general advice on this front is freegeek, and I haven't checked with them yet, and plan to... But it doesn't hurt to ask anyway. Alright... With that excess of background and potentially faulty logic out of the way: Suggestions, go! -- Tyrell Jentink _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug