How to use VNC for gaming?

Question

I was just wondering if it's possible to set up a windows 7 VPS/VNC server to be used for gaming on my local network. I have a macbook pro as my main computer, it doesn't quite have the horsepower that I want for some of the games that I play, but my local home server has great potential and actually was originally a gaming computer.

My question is, is it possible for you to give a VPS access to the Graphics Card and access the server using a VNC? And also which platform would be best for this? e.g. virtualbox or KVM or something similar

I was thinking possibly VirtualBox would be better, but I'm not sure how good it is on Linux.

Also it might be worthwhile to note that I am running CentOS 6.

Solution 1

The short answer is you don't!!

What you're asking for, IMO, isn't doable using VNC. It's a poor technology even when I use it everyday for doing administrator tasks on our 1GB LAN. I couldn't even fathom playing a game in this way.

See these Q&A's from SuperUser and AskUbuntu for additional information about the pitfalls of trying this. They cover VNC as well as playing games over virtualization such as VirtualBox.

• Gaming over LAN, VNC alternative?
• Gaming with Virtualbox, has it worked for you?

Solution 2

Gaming in a VM? Not a chance. Your best bet for any kind of multimedia experience is with Spice, and even with that, support for 3D graphics is experimental and limited, 2d works really well over a network though (you can watch movies or use Skype with a webcam over a remote desktop link).

Comments

[slm]

Are you running CentOS as the host OS, and Windows as a virtual guest on that system?

[OmicronAlpha]

That is correct yes.

[OmicronAlpha]

I've just ended up installing windows, would I be able to run a spice server in windows and connect via my macbook?

[slm]

@ConnerStephenMcCabe - seems like you have another Q here 8-). Here's the spice project page: spice-space.org

[slm]

I don't think Spice is going to help you though, it's a Windows/Linux technology Client/Server, not sure about OSX.

[slm]

@ConnerStephenMcCabe - Links to download spice: spice-space.org/download.html. I wouldn't spend a lot of time w/ this. This tech. isn't going to do what you think in terms of running games on some remote server and play them on OSX etc. That isn't feasible. The best you'll be able to do is dual boot a system that is capable with 2 OSes.

[dyasny]

SPICE is mainly embedded into QEMU, so you can connect to QEMU and KVM based VMs using this protocol, anything production ready is exactly this. There is an experimental project trying to turn spice into a remote access protocol, and not a remote KVM protocol, but I haven't even seen it work.