Load shedding sucks! In South Africa, it is an unfortunate event we must live with. Having your power cut for up to 4 hours can put a serious dent in your gaming time. You can always spend your load shedding time by reading a book, doing chores or taking a walk outside, but why would you? Gaming is life! So, let’s look at some tips for gaming during a black out.
Join in on the new GameClub with Stardew Valley. It’s readily available on both Android and iOS. The game is well optimised and the touch-screen controls work a treat. The auto-attack for delving into the mines makes it a relaxed brawler where you only have to navigate the mazes of rock, stone and minerals in order to find the stairs down to the next level.
Righto, it’s time for a cunning plan! A plan so cunning, I could put a tail on it, and call it a weasel.
Paint the picture.
I have taken to working off of a laptop in powersaving mode, and remoting in a Virtual Machine, running on a beefier computer, that is in turn, plugged into a 1440w inverter with sufficient batteries to keep it up for up to 4 hours.
What this means for work is I get consistent experience where ever the heck I am, as long as I have internet. The question of 2022 is: Can this work for gaming?
Enter parsec
I want to try and install this on my windows gaming virtual machine, and see how well it works. It’s already documented that it works quite well for gaming, on both digitalfoundry and LTT’s youtube channels. And there’s a half dozen more videos of people trying it out for that, directly on native windows install.
So now it’s just a matter of navigating the minefield of PCI passthrough in my scenario, and seeing how long the power holds up against an AMD 2700X, with a GTX1080Ti. Obviously, I’m not going to be playing DOOM Eternal or Kingdom Come Deliverance. I’m just aiming at some 1080p LAN-connected gaming on Grim Dawn to start with, and then possibly trying out some story-driven walking simulators.
I’ll report back with some numbers and photos of my dog powerleveling a new GD character.
Installed parsec on windows that is actual running the games.
Set windows to autologon.
Set steam to autostart.
Set parsec to autostart.
Installed parsec on laptop as client.
Boot windows, everything starts up.
Start client on laptop.
Connect to pc that shows up, it just kinda works.
I made 3 changes to settings on the windows computer: enabled NVIDIA hardware decoding (not the software option that it defaults to) and dropped resolution to 720p, because I don’t have a convenient ethernet cable, and I’m too old to bend down and climb under furniture, so I’m using 5GHz WiFi. I also set the max bandwidth to 50Mbps, but I think it’s only using a fraction of the bandwidth, which seems to support the evidence of it working remotely, outside of your home, via mobile data
It’s a tad inconvenient if I kill my batteries tonight for the sake of science. I’ll will be back in few days with some concrete numbers of how long it lasts on backup power. Although, whatever data I have, will be very specific to my computer hardware, inverter and battery capacity, not to mention, game and it’s graphics settings. I may just undervolt CPU and GPU, for the last benchmark, to see if it helps.
FYI, this has been a bust. I cannot keep the gaming computer up, because the power draw spikes too much. Batteries die within minutes Considering this is an old pc, I reckon a gaming laptop that has a large battery, is probably the easier way of pc gaming in a backout.
Sad panda
I did realise, you can actually game with an Oculus Quest 2 but you would only be able to do it during the day. Night time, no light, nothing to orient the sensors.
Yeah, my MacBook lasts around an hour of gaming while on battery. At least that’s with a more resource intensive game, think it will push to 1.5-2 hours with something more simple like Vampire Survivors.
Considering this is an old pc, I reckon a gaming laptop that has a large battery, is probably the easier way of pc gaming in a backout.
but you would only be able to do it during the day. Night time, no light, nothing to orient the sensors.