XPlane, paperspace and parsec cloud gaming

[Robert Simac]

Just wanted to share my experience...

If you ever get (temporary) away from your good faithful gaming pc... there is a solution, temporary, but functional...

There are quite a few cloud providers offering cloud/online gaming solutions (with preinstalled games), but not so much when it comes to offering bare VM with powerful cpu AND gpu.

I have tested with amazon gpu instances, and xplane was playable, but the price per hour was too steep (for me).

Ultimately, I settled with provider called 'paperspace.com', and their P4000 vm offering pretty good host with 8 cpu cores and dedicated nvidia P4000 GPU, capable of running xplane at very high detail...

Now, when it comes to latency... the client software that 'looks into the remote host' is called 'parsec' and does the magic of
- compressing the host display quickly and sending it over to you (uses x264 or 265 if hw available). For flightsim relatively slow movements, this works just fine EXCEPT when you fly into the rain during night WITH landing lights. Then the compression suffers...
- sending your keystrokes and mouse movements over
- receiving (but not sending) the audio from host to you


Overall, for flight simming, it is... well... playable... Especially if / when AP is used heavily, and joystick is used at takeoff or landings only. The lag is there, but barely noticeable, and it is definitely manageable... The airliners I fly are hogs anyway so lag does not affect them much. For small Cessna, it may be different...


The usb/joystick connecting from your home to remote host is done by yet another piece of software, that is the 'VirtualHere' client. Free version will connect single usb device and that works for the joystick.

The only thing that does NOT work is the audio FROM your home to remote host. That prevents the audio (microphone) use in vatsim, so I have to use the 'text only' mode, or 'receive voice only' mode.

The cost: USD 0.51 per hour of host uptime (billed in seconds) and fixed USD 7 per month for 100GB of disk which is -just- enough for xplane, two planes and 2 continents of scenery...



Hope this helps someone. This is definitely not the permanent gaming solution, but may help when away from gaming rig...

Robert