Remember that argument that consoles are better than PCs because of local co-op? Well, system builder Puget Systems set out on a mission to find exactly how many players a PC could actually handle. Harnessing the power of virtual machines, the team was able to utilize a single PC to power four instances of Battlefield 4 on a 48 man server and still maintain 60+ fps at 1440p resolution on medium/high settings. Forget split-screen, forget being limited to aim-assisted controllers, we’re talking about a pure Battlefield PC experience for 4 players using a single glorious PC. You can check out their system setup below.
| Testing Hardware | |
| Motherboard: | Asus P9X79 WS |
| CPU: | Intel Xeon E5-2695 v2 12 Core @ 2.4 GHz |
| RAM: | 4x Kingston DDR3-1600 8GB ECC Reg. (32GB total) |
| GPU: | 4x ASUS Radeon R9 280 3GB DirectCU II |
| Hard Drive: | Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SATA 6Gb/s SSD |
| PSU: | Silverstone ST1500 1500W |
What’s even more incredible, despite building their system for 4 virtual operating systems, you could theoretically build a system that might power up to 66 virtual PCs at once using a Quad Xeon with 66 video cards! While that’s highly theoretical and possibly impossible due to a number of real-world factors, it’s clear that 4 virtual gaming PCs might actually be a low number for a powerful enough system.
You can check out Puget Systems entire build complete with a short intro on how they configured the virtual machines at http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Multi-headed-VMWare-Gaming-Setup-564/.