[PLUG] Gaming graphics cards?

[Tyrell Jentink]

Hello all,

I am not a gamer... But I have games I like. Luckily, one of my favorite
game franchises, Unreal Tournament, has a long history of Linux support.

The latest game engine in the Unreal lineup, Unreal Engine 4, is open
source... Proprietary, covered by restrictive terms, but available to the
public without licensing fees... So "Open" none the less. And it compiles
on Linux.

OK, but here's the "Weird" part: I'm a Linux server admin, not a gamer... I
have servers with many times the processor and RAM resources I need, but I
don't have any modern desktop hardware. All my IT resources go to the
server farm, because that's what benefits the family most, and I have no IT
budget. SO, I am going for the illustrious and ever elusive Virtual Gaming
Computer... Virtualizing (probably) Ubuntu in a KVM virtual machine,
passing the graphics card directly into the VM using PCI passthrough, and
give it 12 virtual processor cores and 24GB of RAM, and see what it can
do...

But, I need a graphics card. I am looking for a gaming graphics card to
play Unreal Tournament 4 with. It doesn't have to be the latest and
greatest, in fact even devices as old as the Radeon 6870 HD and the GeForce
470 GTX meet Epic Game's requirements. It does need to fit in a server
case, but that doesn't necessarily mean low profile; They plug into a riser
board, but I'm sure bigger cards exist that won't fit; it probably
shouldn't be PCI-E x16 (I have the channels available, but I would need a
different riser board... x8 would just be easier to deal with), it doesn't
need to be a workhorse, but it should probably have 2GB of RAM and a fairly
wide memory interface, and it should support DirectX 12 (As a baseline, not
as a direct requirement... I'm obviously not using DirectX in Linux).
Meanwhile, as a virtualization environment, the board will be rendering the
graphics and passing them back to the main CPU, rather than passing them to
a display... so memory and interface speed is a priority over caring about
output types or counts, my lack of PCI-E channels not withstanding. I think
these requirements eliminate most of the newest high end cards... And most
of the lower end cards... But should leave room in slightly older high end
cards... The kind gamers would be getting rid of. Also, the kind that have
recently been rendered useless for Etherum mining.

A quick search on Newegg suggests some of the lower end GeForce GT 1030s
and the like can be had sub-$150 and will likely meet my needs... But are
also a bit more than I hoped to spend.

I know that the general advice on this front is freegeek, and I haven't
checked with them yet, and plan to... But it doesn't hurt to ask anyway.

Alright... With that excess of background and potentially faulty logic out
of the way: Suggestions, go!

--
Tyrell Jentink