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Yep.

Something like this will only be economical if you really plan on only using it for the occasional single player game a few times a year.

If you use it to play games regularly at even modest frequencies (20+ hours per week), the 50c per hour will quickly start to accumulate and become a recurring monthly bill of $40+.

At that point you might as well invest in a decent gaming desktop and stream from it instead. A i3 + 750 TI based system can match the performance of this setup and would cost less than $500 all-in, which is about the cost of 1 year of streaming from this setup at 20 hrs per week. You'll get a much better experience due to the much lower latency and not having to worry about penny pinching on every session.



> A i3 + 750 TI based system can match the performance of this setup

Are you sure about that?


Probably not in terms of pure compute power, my wording is definitely a bit off there.

However, the overall gaming experience you get with the local streaming setup will probably be similar to, if not superior to, the remote streaming setup regardless of absolute hardware power, because i3 + GTX 750 TI can definitely handle most games at 60fps in 720p (and a lot of them at 1080p in my experience). So the comparison ends up between streaming 720p with 50ms latency due to bandwidth constraints over WAN vs streaming 720p (and some 1080p) with <5ms latency within a LAN.


The GPU alone costs $2k. The CPU they use costs $1.5k, and is split in two between you and another user.


Sorry, would you happen to have any sources on the claim that the CPU is split between only 2 users?

I had always assumed that their utilization rates would be much higher than 2 users per physical CPU, even for higher end instances like this one.

The Nvidia GRID GPU almost definitely is shared as well, since that's the entire purpose of the GRID SKU:

http://www.nvidia.ca/object/grid-technology.html

According to this, the K520 supports up to 16 concurrent users while sporting 2x GK104 based GPUs of power. When fully utilized I figured each user won't be getting much more power than a single midrange GPU, and I can't imagine why Amazon would choose to not keep them fully utilized either. If you have any sources otherwise, I'd love to see them as well.


You're probably right about the GPU.

Regarding the CPU, when creating an instance you can see this: "G2 instances are backed by 1 x NVDIA GRID GPU (Kepler GK104) and 8 x hardware hyperthreads form an Intel Xeon E5-2670". According to [Intel's product page](http://ark.intel.com/products/64595), the processor only has 16 hyperthreads, so 2 users per CPU. My reasoning may be wrong though, I'm not a virtualization expert at all.




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