Today we will talk about my experience with Microsoft Azure and Cloud Gaming. A few days ago I wanted to try Microsoft Azure because a lot of people made videos about this service.
I wanted to see what it really offers, so I made a trial account. It is important to tell you that you cannot make virtual machines if you have a trial subscription, you must switch to a ‘pay as you go’ subscription but you will use the credits received for free.
This is what the interface looks like. All the tutorials I saw on YouTube used the NV6 package. That’s what I did, I made a virtual machine with the NV6 package.
In North Europe, this package costs 744 € / month, somewhere around 1.25 € / hour. The trial offers 12 months of Microsoft Azure and 170 € credits. Doing a simple math calculation would mean 136 hours of virtual machine.
Of these 136 hours, it takes about a maximum of two hours to set up the virtual machine for Parsec, so 134 hours left. It is necessary to stop the virtual machine when you are not using it not to waste your credits.
That being said, let’s talk about the performance of the NV6 package.
System Specs
- CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 (2.6 GHz, only 6 vCPUs)
- GPU: NVIDIA Tesla M60 8GB GDDR5
- RAM: 56 GiB
- OS: Windows 10 Pro v1809
Cyberpunk 2077
Reading these specifications, you think you can run Cyberpunk 2077 with all the graphics settings on Ultra. Spoiler: You can’t.
The test was performed on the latest version of Cyberpunk 2077 at the time of posting the article. I looked for some potential reasons why Cyberpunk doesn’t work on Azure at all.
- The CPU. This CPU has 6 virtual cores on NV6.
- Windows Version. The Windows version is a bit old and the developers have announced that there may be such problems on older versions.
- GPU Driver Version. The TESLA M60 is not a GPU for games, the latest driver version being launched in 2018 and is not optimized for any game.
That being said, if you want to play AAA games from 2019 or 2020 using Cloud Gaming, don’t go for Azure.
But the tests don’t stop there. I’ve also made a userbenchmark to see how good the system is.
Separately I was able to choose a hard drive, so I put 2TB of ‘Standard SSD’. I don’t know what a ‘Standard SSD’ means to Microsoft, but clearly not an SSD. You can see in the test on the userbenchmark what I’m talking about.
Another interesting thing, I wanted to run a YouTube video in 4K at 60 frames per second. I opened the Task Manager and I was … surprised.
The CPU used 80% by Google Chrome only for a 4K video at 60 frames per second, in 2021, 744 € / month.
The Conclusion
I try to make the conclusion as short and easy to understand. Don’t expect too much from Microsoft Azure, the NV6 package.
