Broke my $800 rule for video cards and bought the SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB GDDR6 PCI Express 4.0 x16 ATX Video Card 11322-01-40G for my main desktop so I can finally put my living room PC in the living room.
Desktop has been without a graphics card for months, the 4090 is too expensive and the 4080 is a bad buy.

Haven't bought a AMD card since the "GIGABYTE GV-R587D5-1GD-B Radeon HD 5870 (Cypress XT) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card w/ATI Eyefinity" in 2009. If/when AMD disappoints me this time I'll add them to my 5yr shit list like I usually do for companies that disappoint me.
So for I've installed the drivers and immediately had a .dll error so I couldn't launch their control panel so I had to copy the .dll out of the setup and paste it in C:\windows\system32\drivers Hey, at least it didn't prevent me from booting....

Can play Witcher 3 at 120fps at 3840x1600 with everything maxed except for RT turned off. With RT turned on FPS are halved but it's around the 60fps mark.

/EDIT Why do driver versions have to be so complicated "AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.3.2 Driver Version 22.40.43.01 for Windows® 10 and Windows® 11 (Windows Driver Store Version 31.0.14043.1000)."
Which driver version is it? I see three.

i wonder how much fps you got in Pył 😀

So I've spent all weekend and today putting ESX on my server, moving my bhyve VMs from TrueNAS to ESX, setting up ESX to boot TrueNAS via passthrough of my SATA controllers and NVME SSDs.
I've also today added a 3060 GPU, removed my Asus Hyper PCIE 4.0 and replaced it with a cheapo PCIE 3 card (Asus was too long).

I have now consolidated all game launchers and VMs to one server. The one launcher preventing this was GOG galaxy which would only work on a desktop. It would not work in bhyve, does not work with RDP, TightVNC wouldn't work with GOG galaxy in bhyve, you can't store the games on a network share etc etc. I finally verified that GOG galaxy running in a VM in Vmware ESxi works just fine using vsphere (not RDP). I've also moved my macOS vm within my Windows 11 VM and am using Vmware Workstation within the Windows 11 VM to load the macOS VM. (I'm not going to modify ESXi to run macOS since it won't be longer before there is no x86 support at all with macOS).

The final piece was the 3060 GPU. Ever since I moved all game launchers off my desktop PC to VMs the shitty CEF game launchers like Epic require a GPU so I've had to allocate 8 CPUs to a VM to get Epic to barely work. Well after putting this 3060, enabling passthrough and RDP into the Windows 11 VM the Epic launcher is actually using the GPU. It's still shit but it's as shitty as it runs on the desktop so that's progress and the other launchers can use the GPU as well.

Final piece will be to backup the ESX configs and VM images and then after testing this GPU out via RDP onward to more game testing which now that this thing is using ESX instead of bhyve I may be able to do more testing much more easily.

Broke down and bought 10x 22TB IronWolf Pro drives today.
Finally down to 1TB free on my server (was down to 700GB until I did some GOGrepo cleanup) with 13x 16TB drives so I held out as long as I could just wish there were larger drives available.....with how my luck goes they'll be out when all my drives are done rebuilding.
This should give me about 60TB to play with so may be able to move the games from my GOG dataset (iscsi) to my other iscsi dataset on my platter drives for a total of 10TB of online games that require downloading to a "local" disk instead of to a network share like steam.
May also be able to enable snapshots as well.

Holy smoke, what do you use all that storage for? (Please don't say pr0n) 🤣

Absolutely no pron, didn't see the point. 😉

So I've been backing up all of my files since 1990 and have never lost anything.

Currently:
Media 87TB (still have a lot of blu-rays and DVDs I haven't copied over)
10TB iSCSI volume(s) for online game sync (I download and update all games in a VM and then copy to my gaming PC which has no launchers, was finally able to get rid of the shitty GOG Galaxy client by switching to ESX and using the web client)
Roughly 43TB Dedupe (Games) (Might be 25+TB higher without dedupe)
21 TB Files and games of which there are no dupes

Wow, that's massive, cool with a never ending backup ... Wonder how many of my old DVDRs are still readable 🤣

For those interested it looks like it is taking roughly 3 days to resilver each drive. so 3 days x 12 drives (one is already 22tb) = 36 days. Those other drives sure are going to get a workout heh.

DosFreak wrote on 2023-09-16, 17:58:

For those interested it looks like it is taking roughly 3 days to resilver each drive. so 3 days x 12 drives (one is already 22tb) = 36 days. Those other drives sure are going to get a workout heh.

What the reasons to use VM to play with games? This sounds extra work to do? Then put that too on a server? Not on your gaming PC?

Cheers,

I only play games that are DRM free or that I can crack as such I can't trust that they don't require a launcher unless I try to run them on a computer without a launcher. It makes more sense that my gaming PC doesn't have any launchers that way it enforces that and no games sneak past.
Also these games are updating all the time, I tend to restrict them to updating once a month so it's easier to track changes (since I backup previous versions) and I don't what to leave my gaming computer online while downloading. It's best to centralize the downloading to my server which then downloads them directly to the server instead of downloading to my gaming PC and then uploading them back to the server (what I used to do). The other benefits are that the server uses ECC memory and ZFS for the filesystem (except for the VM where all launcher except Steam (Steam downloads directly to a share on the servers) download to which is NTFS).

Another benefit is it prevents data collection by the launchers, they can only collect data from the VM. Of course they can still collect telemetry from the games themselves since I haven't yet bothered to restrict which programs can use port 80 or 443 outbound.

I don't use the VM used to download games to play games, I use other VMs for those but mainly my gaming is done directly on my gaming PC.

Specs from an old post back in 2002 on another forum
1990-94

Packard Bell 286-12mhz (parents)

Mobo: Unknown

Memory: 1meg

Video: 256k

HD: 40m

OS: MSDOS 4.0-6.22

Modem: 2400b

95-98

486DX4/100 (parents)

Mobo: ?? Gonna have to go look

Memory: 12mb starting-32mb

Video: Cirrus Logic 2mb!

HD: 540mb Seagate, 850mb Maxtor

OS: DOS 6.22-Windows 95-95b-98-98SE-NT4

Modem: 14.4-33.6

99-2000

K63-400

Mobo:Soyo SY5EMA+

Memory: 128mb

Video: TNT1-G400

HD: 20gb Maxtor

OS: 98SE/NT4/Windows 2000

2000-2001

P3-550

Mobo:Abit BE6

Memory: 256mb

Video: G400-Geforce 2 GTS

HD: Forgot what I had at the time. Probly 20gb Maxtor

OS: Windows 2000

2001-2002

Dual P31ghz

Mobo:Abit VP6

Memory: 512mb

Video: Geforce 2 GTS-Geforce 3

HD: Couple a 40gb IBM'S/60GB

OS: Windows 2000

XP 2000+

Memory: 512mb

Video: Geforce 3 Ti500

HD: 60gb/80gb's

OS: Windows 2000/XP/98SE/NT4

if you run out of ammo just get one of these (or 10) 😉
https://www.tech-america.com/item/solidigm-d5 … sbfpf2bv614t001
and m.2 adapter

DosFreak wrote on 2023-09-10, 18:04:

wish there were larger drives available.....

i guess you wouldn't buy 10 IronWolf Pro 24 TB for $649 anyway 😉

Okay removed a 3.5" drive tray from the 5950x pc and was able to fit the 3060 in there so Windows 7,8 are back on.
Just need to order a IPMI card from asrock rack so I don't have to disable the console in proxmox.

For the i7 that means just 2000 (BWC),XP, vista (although it can run higher if needed).
I may or may not be able to fit another Pcie video card for <2000. The HD5450 will work for vanilla 2k but not for less than. If I do it will obstruct the fans on the 980ti so I'm kind of meh on the idea.
Not that big of a deal anyway since we have pcem.

I'm thinking for <2000 a egpu may be the key unless I setup another computer which I don't want to do.
Likely best to way until oculink egpus are more prevalent or TB5 instead of throwing away money on TB3 even though TB3 is more than enough for this use case it doesn't hurt to have the bandwidth for the future.

Swapped out the 980 Ti in the i7 machine with:
Video: GT X 780
Video: Quadro FX 1300

This should allow 9x/NT4/2000 vanilla compatibility with proxmox which has yet to be tested.

There may be a way to use the 980ti in my 5950x machine and then possibly room for an x-fi if I get a egpu for the 7900xtx but waiting to see how TB5 plays out.
A better possibility may be the 1080ti in the 5950x machine which means vista+ for 5950x and <= XP for the i7 machine but putting as many OS on one machine increases longevity and ease of use so 980ti it will likely be.