this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Sorry but that is totally not true, if you have a second graphics card to passthrough to the virtual machine.
It will still be subpar performance, bottlenecked by the CPU resource you can allocate to the VM as well as your original hardware's capabilities to power the VM among many other variables. Running a VM to game will always produce subpar results. Using GPU passthrough will increase performance, but it's almost always preferable to play on real hardware.
The real answer will always be: if you want to game on Linux, utilize Wine/Proton and Steam/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic/some other launcher that lets you fine tune Wine/Proton to cater to the specific game.
Maybe if you're using type 2 virtualization bullshit like VirtualBox, but for type 1 like KVM? Performance is near identical to host CPU, the overhead is somewhere between 2~4%. Hardly something you'd ever notice.
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-fast-is-kvm-host-vs-virtual-machine-performance/110192
Wine is fine, but it comes with its lot of compatibility issues you'll never have to deal with with a VM with GFX passthrough.
Sure. I admit my experience running a VM is limited to "type 2 bullshit" like VirtualBox. But that also requires that OP have a spare GPU lying around they care enough to pop into their machine and set up passthrough for, which most people don't. Especially with these GPU prices lately, yikes. Chances are they have a decent GPU already in their system, and buying an equivalent GPU just for passthrough is... 😬
So while baremetal-like performance is certainly possible with a VM, it's still not an ideal solution for most people.
Use the iGPU for your main OS, and discreet for gaming in a VM. Works wonders and you don't need to deal with NVIDIA drivers in your main OS. And save some energy to boot.
Hmm that's a neat solution. What if you do video or photo editing in your main OS, though, or any other kind of work that would benefit from discreet graphics? Is your only option then essentially two GPUs, or can you switch between passthrough neatly, or...?
You can switch between the two, but it does require a reboot. So in that case two discreet would be more convenient. But for encoding and what not you probably can get away with a rather cheap discreet that works well on nouveau (or go Radeon) and keep the 4090 for gaming.
Interesting.
My system is all AMD, I prefer not to wrestle with Nvidia's drivers on Linux, lol.
It's been years since I ran Windows on my machine, but I still miss my photo editing software. Nice as DarkTable is, it's no replacement for CaptureOne. And it's pretty much not possible to get CaptureOne running in a productive manner under Wine. I looked into doing passthrough to a VM a while back, but it just seemed a hassle and I didn't have a spare GPU. I game on my Linux install, so iGPU isn't sufficient for my needs there. My photography hobby just has to suffer. 😂
I haven't adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.
When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I'd just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.
Super late reply here, but I was searching the Linux sub for vfio because I love this topic, lol. I'm happy to report that as others are saying, a vfio setup can be very performant! The GPU is near native, and with the proper CPU configuration, you won't be dealing with much overhead there either. The biggest factor is the overall load on your machine from running a host OS with the guest layered on top. I use my PC host OS primarily as a QEMU/KVM hypervisor, so when I need maximum gaming performance I simply turn off or suspend operation on all other VMs to free the resources for Windows. The only game I've had trouble with recently at 3440x1440 is Starfield, and unfortunately I think that is more a sign that an upgrade is finally due. I've used this setup for all kinds of games with no problem, including demanding virtual reality titles.
The biggest problem I've run into? Some anticheats truly despise any kind of virtualization. I've only run into issues with 2 games I like to play, but that is a real caveat. I consider it 100% an issue with the companies implementing these policies, who as I see it don't deserve my money in the first place. But other than the initial configuration headache and extra hardware required (if you don't have an iGPU anyway), this is the main drawback in my eyes.