Multi-seat/Multi-gamer single GPU status quo

Communities Gaming
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Hey all,

I’ve been trying to explore the idea of having multiple people game on the same machine, which people usually solve by slapping in more GPUs.

I have been poking around the idea of having multiple instances of a Window manager(only tried with hyprland), but from what I understood sunshine or other remote gaming servers usually look directly in the display buffers - for instance in Hyprland, I would create virtual outputs which the WM treats as monitors but don’t show up in sunshine as an option to share. I also looked towards having multiple instances of the WM in different TTYs, but they are not active at the same time.

I recently heard about Bubblewrap in the context of this article which would help isolate inputs between multiple users, but you can’t just isolate an entire window manager unfortunately. Ideally I would have two sunshine servers with separate mouse and keyboard

I for one with I could launch one WM instance per monitor and just have three sunshine servers ready to go, but is such a thing possible to implement? It seems feasible with one good GPU and lighter games.

Do you have any experience in this direction to share?

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I also wonder if there could exist a mechanism in the future to segment off a vGPU by just telling it it’s another GPU with just one displayport and X memory

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Have you figured out how to create virtual outputs? I thought that was pretty tricky with wayland…

What happens if you just use some dummy plugs and multiple instances of sunshine tied to the different monitors?

I eventually split out my gaming machine, HTPC, and server into separate machines after banging my head against input issues so would be interested in what you figure out.

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Hyprland allows virtual outputs, but they don’t get read by sunshine since they aren’t low level enough I suppose.

If I just do two sunshine servers they control the same cursor :frowning: