Remote Gaming Setup (self hosted cloud gaming)
With spending a lot of time away from home I needed a way to still take a break and play games. A lot of the games I was playing wouldn't run well on MacOS or Linux and were designed to only work on Windows. As great as my M1 Macbook pro was for my projects, it was not good for gaming.
I looked into different cloud gaming solutions as an option. I was already subscribed to Stadia which I'm a fan of, but Stadia has a limited selection and it's library exists outside of my existing Steam library. So I checked out GeForce Now which is Nvidia's cloud gaming option that uses your existing Steam library. I subscribed to the 4k version and immediately unsubscribed the same day. GeForce Now also had a limited selection because vendors weren't allowing their games to be played on the platform.
I love self hosting my own services and had my own really nice gaming computer. So I started to wonder how could I use my own desktop for cloud gaming, but at the same time not drink up ton's of energy by having a gaming desktop on 24/7. I settled on using Parsec as a way to remotely gaming on my desktop. Parsec has a MacOS client (and soon an M1 version). It's also possible to run Parsec as the system before a user logs in which also helps when I'm only remote. To startup my computer remotely so it's not on 24/7 I settled on using magic packets. The broadcast traffic was getting blocked on VPN so I used an Ubuntu VM, hosted on my server, as my remote box to start my desktop.
Parsec works amazing over the cloud and the delay isn't noticeable. I've played games like Dark Souls that requires a good reaction time without a problem. So my work flow for playing games became
- Connect to VPN with Mac
- Login to Ubuntu VM and Send Magic Packet to wakeup gaming desktop
- Disconnect from VPN and connect to remote desktop with Parsec
- Lean back in the couch and game with a controller that's being passed through Parsec as well