Virtualization and Gaming, Wrap-UpFirst, let's be clear: until recently, Nvidia GRID and XenDesktop/VMWare Horizon View was not really being designed or marketed for gaming. While it is improving quickly, if game streaming is your primary concern then virtual desktops might not be the best choice right now if you don't have a large number of users. But in the situations where you want or need to use a VDI like XenDesktop then there are a number of things you should be aware of.
When using XenDesktop with Nvidia GRID cards, the biggest problems we found were not related to performance (our GRID K2 workstation card actually performed pretty well considering the drivers are not optimized for gaming) but rather the fact that fullscreen mode and mouse capturing is simply not supported. The fullscreen issue is actually on purpose with XenDesktop (and VMware Horizon as well) to prevent a user from being unable to access their local desktop, but means that you have to run a game in windowed or fullscreen windowed mode. While this can be easily worked around for most games, the mouse capturing issue is a bit more of a problem and results in some really strange behavior in games like first and third person shooters that use mouse capturing.
We tried Borderlands 2, Just Cause 2, Battlefield 4, and Team Fortress 2 and found that the lack of mouse capturing really messes with the mouse sensitivity. A tiny move of the mouse would result in your character spinning around in multiple circles. Even with the mouse sensitivity turned down to the lowest level possibly, the games were still unplayable. However, we did find that using a USB controller like an Xbox 360 controller worked perfectly. So if you prefer controllers over a mouse/keyboard than FPS games should actually work fine.
Other games that don't require that kind of mouse capture worked surprisingly well with a keyboard and mouse. Racing and arcade games like DiRT Showdown and Super Street Fighter IV that only use a keyboard ran pretty much perfectly. MOBA and strategy games like DOTA 2 and StarCraft 2 were also very playable although sometimes the mouse cursor would be the default Windows cursor rather than the game's custom cursor. The biggest issue with these games is that since you have to run games in windowed or fullscreen windowed mode you can sometimes accidentally click the mouse outside of the gaming window.
Note that even though the games are running at 60-90 FPS, the low-end CPU and onboard graphics on the client machine is not doing anything. However, the network usage is very highFrom a playability standpoint, the 30 FPS streaming limit was certainly noticeable but whether it is a huge problem is going to depend on the user. Some users have no problem with 30 FPS while others really prefer to have something closer to 60 FPS or even higher. Even with the stream running at only 30 FPS, we saw a bit of display lag when we tried to play games at 1920x1080 and ended up having to turn the resolution down to 1366x768. 1080p worked great for browsing the web and running most applications, but games simply have so much activity on the screen that it caused just a bit too much lag for us to be able to game comfortably.
One thing that caught us a bit by surprise was how little input lag there was once we set the resolution to 720p. It was certainly still there, but was honestly not as bad as we thought it was going to be considering that we were playing a game remotely over the network.
Overall, playing games on a virtual desktop was not as great as we hoped, but also not as bad as we feared. Game streaming isn't something we would quite recommend doing just yet outside of the most casual of games, but we have no doubt that it is going to greatly improve in the future. No matter how much better it gets though, input lag (even a tiny amount) is probably what is going to be the biggest hurdle for this technology. It was actually not very bad over a local network but we can't see this being used for any sort of competitive gaming in the near future. However, if you just want to be able to play games that are playable at 30 FPS and don't require very much in the way of twitch responses then virtual desktops with Nvidia GRID would likely work great.
