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Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image
Brent Batas (Lisk) asked

AMD server seems to be more expensive than Intel server, different than what blog post suggests

In this blog post:
https://blog.playfab.com/blog/azure-playfab-multiplayer-servers-improves-price-performance-ratio-for-game-server-hosting-with-new-amd-virtual-machines

It says that the new AMD VM's should "deliver a 5-40% improvement in performance at lower cost"

Specifically, it was mentioned that switching from Fsv2 (which we currently use), to Dasv4, would offer more performance/price.

However, I ran the calculations on the pricing calculator (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/) and found:


This is the closest match I could find based on the blog article and pricing calculator that had 4 vCPUs and SSD.


For our game, CPU is by far the bottleneck, so anything beyond 4 GB ram is just bonus points, so I feel like we are paying for extra ram on the Dasv4 that we don't need.

Am I missing something here, or is the comparable AMD server actually more expensive than the Intel one?

pricingCustom Game Serversmultiplayer
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Lester Jackson avatar image
Lester Jackson answered

YES, a raw rate comparison between the Dasv4 and Fsv2 series per the rate sheet suggest Fsv2 may be cheaper. But the value raised on the blog post was specific to price per ACU. While the vCPU are equal in count, the (a) RAM is greater and the (b) measured performance is better in the Dasv4 series over the Fsv2 series. Observe the ACU /vCPU ratios are larger for D2asv4 over F2sv2

Multiplayer Servers - detailed price sheet - PlayFab | Microsoft Docs

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Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image Brent Batas (Lisk) commented ·

Thanks! The SKU names are still a bit confusing to me. In PlayFab's Quota page, they all have simple names like Dasv4 and Dav4, but on the Microsoft pricing calculator page there are additional numbers in a slightly different format.

For example, the closest I could find to Dasv4 was "D4as v4" - is this the same thing? What is the meaning of the 4 between the D and a? Also, what about D2as v4?

Does PlayFab offer any AMD machines with 2 vCPUs (at half the cost) compared to a 4 vCPU server?

Edit: spent a little more time and now I think I understand the notation and basically answered my own question. The first 4 is the # of vCPUs for that machine, and the quota is shared across all vCPU counts. So for example Fsv2 is like a "family" but within that family, there are F2s_v2, F4s_v2, F8s_v2, etc. and the "s" seems to indicate SSD vs. non-SSD.

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Citrus Yan avatar image
Citrus Yan answered

What stated in the blog post is that Dav4 and Dasv4 series offer better Price per ACU ratio. Theoretically, with higher ACUs per VM, more server instances can be ran on a single machine, which eventually saves the overall cost since lesser VM hours are needed. However, you mentioned that the bottleneck for your game is CPU so that extra RAM is not very much needed, for that, you might consider sticking with the Fsv2 series.

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