So I'd love to get Arma 3 and Arma 2 hopefully with dayz. I love those games, and miss them a lot. I can't do a virtual machine, or I'd not be asking. I'm using a 760, with an AMD 4170, Ubuntu Gnome.
Well, aside from buying a second graphics card to do a PCI passthrough, this is your only option: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/wlzs1/wine_did_anyone_try_dayzarma_ii/
I have a few spare HD 6570's but if I put them in my system then it will not boot to the OS, it gets stuck on "starting 219" I can't remember if that is all it says, but it says something along those lines. I tried to just leave it run like that but it messed up my computer, so I had to re install my OS.
You have the proprietary driver for the 760, right? Probably should remove that before installing a second video card. From what I've heard though, Nvidia cards don't play so nicely with PCI passthrough. Maybe things have changed though.
I'm using the x.org open source drivers, and I've herd that also. Sorry for just now responding, I was asleep.
This is mostly correct. As far as I can gather most Nvidia cards technically support PCI passthrough but the firmware on consumer cards block the function and you'd have to hack the firmware so the card it thinks it is a Quadro instead of a GTX. This is mostly because Nvidia want you to fork out the extra £3000 - £5000 for the workstation grade card even through the hardware on consumer cards support the feature but just has it blocked. Also for this application a proper Quadro would be useless as they are not meant for gaming.
Well, if you install the proprietary drivers, you might have a pretty decent experience running the game on Wine.
That explains why I never got PCI passthrough to work on my Nvidia card...
Anyway BTT: Wine's your best option. Check if winegames has a preset for it, if so try to get that to work! If not/you want to do it manually, be sure to disable shadows! I've heard they're especially buggy in wine. Also things like the XP mode from arma, and D9 mode might help. Good luck!
It is also worth noting that ARMA 2 and 3 are notorious for being poorly optimised and performance isn't great running natively on decent hardware so it is likely to be much worse when emulated or in a VM.