As a gamer in australia id say its nothing unless you're super good and competitive,
Im stuck on transatlantic ocean cables as for pings its triple digits.
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As long as you have 2 NICs you can play anything like a MMO, I in fact play GW2 and it works great (no difference in it at all) but it is also how I found out about the latency in sharing a NIC between the two, I never had a noticeable issue in file transfers or really surfing in the guest, but the very first time I fired up GW2 and started a session I noticed a big lag in mouse movements along with the sound latency, it was really unplayable, sure you could roam but go to a world event and you were laying on the ground dead before you saw or heard what happen.
So after a little research I found the problem, I kept the on-board NIC for the host (used my last PCI slot on the MB) and added a Intel PCI card for the guest, after blacklisting the card and passing it to the guest all the latency with movement in-game went away and it was playable, of course the sound still had latency but it was months later before I totally solved that with the USB sound card.
This is why I try to stress to people that you can not do this on a whim and that you are essentially building two computers in one box, it is very much that way and people wanting to do this and have any success need to view it in that perspective, you can share a lot of things virtually CPU cores, memory, USB devices, SATA devices but the more of those devices you can split, blacklist, and pass to the guest as physical hardware the better the performance will be and it will be seemless, it is why mine runs all the time, if the host (linux) is running my guest (Win 7) is running, it is the best of both worlds IMHO.
No problem...happy to share.
I would not build a system for gpu pass through if you are going to be gaming and light computing primarily or if you are not a virtual machine and Linux wizard.
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One day recently I logged into my computer and saw that Windows 10 had update overnight. I also saw that my Chrome icon was removed from my taskbar and instead there was an Edge icon. Then I played a song and discovered that VLC was no longer my default music player and in fact I had a hard time switching back to it. On that day, Windows was no longer an option as main OS for me. Whatever struggle passthrough is, it will be worth it.
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I thought you might like to see my monitor setup, the upper left monitor is a instance of firefox showing camera feeds from our CCTV server, bottom left is my main host screen where I'm typing this, upper right is another host screen with a music app playing music off our media server, bottom right is the KVM running Win 7..
If you can zoom in on the KVM screen you can read the list of games on Steam that I have played in the pass through environment.
One other thing I'd add is that prior to switching to Linux about 2 years ago I was a solid Windows user for all my life, a few months later after the switch I did the pass through and have never looked back...there are lots of guides on the net telling you how to configure your system if your using one of the recommended distros, it's not that complex that a novice user can not follow the guide and be successful, I'd also mention that there are people here who will be glad to hold your hand and help you over the hoops you have to jump.
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While I don't necessarily agree I understand your point of view, just like dual booting it comes down to the user and what they want and need out of their system.
Oh yeah that's cool. Thanks for showing off your desk!
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I don't think I've found anything that straight won't run. There's been a couple games I've had trouble with that I was suspicious might have something to do with the fact that it's running in a VM, but never been able to prove it.
I got The Walking Dead in a Humble Bundle a while back and I've never been able to play it. It crashes on start and none of the solutions online that fix it for others work for me. And support couldn't seem to solve it either.
I bought Wolfenstein: The New Order last summer, and could barely hit like 15 FPS in the beginning minutes on the lowest possible settings. Support couldn't seem to solve it and I finally refunded it before I hit my 2 hours...
Like I said, no proof it's related to the VM but I've wondered. Otherwise, its just slight overhead I've noticed in games that use the CPU since mine isn't ideal for this purpose from my understanding. I'll be getting more cores next time.
Yeah, I think the AMD drivers might be part of my problem. But on the other hand, I understand Nvidia intentionally screws with people passing their cards through to a VM. No personal experience since I've never tried that, but I've read it in a couple places. So I'm not really sure if I'll go Green or Red on my next build.
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I had this problem with Fallout 3 but was able to solve it with a few config tweaks, I know my FPS are low on some games like in Far Cry 3 they ran at a steady 30-40 FPS but never topped out above 60, honestly I'm sure the overhead is part of the problem firstly because of the AMD architecture compared to Intel as far as how instructions are processed, then the threads or lack of threads, secondly games being optimized for Nvidia cards and not 100% compatibility with AMD GPUs, then thirdly the basic wack-job that AMD releases and calls drivers at times, some are good other are game breakers.
I originally tried to use a pair of GTX 550Ti cards....so I have first hand experience dealing with that aspect...lol
I know that there is a performance hit for the guest in a KVM just because it's in a container, then I'm sure the AMD architecture creates another because of how it handles instructions compared to Intel CPUs, but the cost of cores on the Intel platform is way to high (or was when I built) and is why I'm very hopeful that Zen is what they say and at a competitive price point compared to Intel when it arrives next year.
I'm not dissatisfied in any way but know it could be better also, I have no issues with the system and in fact it really works much better than I ever expected it to which is a problem in itself because I'm looking for ways to make a robust system even more robust which is going to cost me more $$$...lol
Games aside, mine does run all of the programs I originally needed it to which is Abobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Corel, and a couple other programs, the games are just a diversion that is a added benefit to being able to play as it wasn't my primary goal when I started.
Thanks for the info...
I'll chime in.
I have been running a passthrough setup for six or eight months now. It has been amazing. The productivity it gives you is amazing. I definitely have to thank @Blanger for helping me through some of the issues and quirks I had getting my setup to work.
There are a couple things I would do different, and will do different when I reinstall (probably soon). First is a dedicated NIC. It works fine sharing the way it is, but it would just be nice to be dedicated. The other thing is to either store the OS image on an SSD, or dedicate a decent sized SSD to the VM. The original OS image I made was too small, so I had to create an empty image for more storage, and both reside on a nasty old 1TB WD Green drive. It's terrible.
I have a i7 6700k, and the cores/threads situation is alright. I never feel like I don't have enough processing power. I didn't have enough memory for the first few months, but recently upgraded to 32GB and it feels great to let the VM have 8GB instead of 4GB.
USB connectivity was a problem, so I am doing a passthrough of a USB3 PCI-E card to the VM. I am using a separate keyboard and mouse set for the VM and a different set for the host. It takes up desk space, but it works.I also got a very simple USB sound card type thing that works just fine for gaming.
The only thing that you can't do very well is stress testing when overclocking. I had to install windows on a standalone SSD just to test my overclock. Linux just isn't very good for that.
So, yes, GPU passthrough is very feasible. You just have to be willing to tinker to get things setup just right. And you have to be patient when things break.
I may come back a little later to add a few more thoughts. Gotta go do some family time stuff for a bit.
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This ^^^^^^^^^ are two of the most important considerations, wither it is a SSD or just a spare drive separating the host and guest systems by giving them their own drive is a performance boost for the guest, it avoids most of the latency in read/writes that a shard drive creates, even a separate partition on the same physical drive will not give you the same level of performance that totally separate drives will.
Sadly for me and a lot of others you only figure it out after you have a working and stable pass through forcing you to create another, I'm on my 8th KVM since starting on the hardware I'm using and yeah I could have edited QEMU/Vert-manager a couple times and prolly got the results I was wanting but every time I built a new KVM I learned more and fixed mistakes I made in previous tries, you can always have multi-able KVMs made but with the pass through you can only run one at a time if the same hardware is pass through to each.
I've changed my cores and memory given to the KVM several times but have settled on 6 cores and 16g going to the guest leaving 2cores and 16g for the host, I do a lot of multi-tasking between the two systems and don't want to cut the host short but yet give the guest plenty of potential.
I am also planning for a GPU Pass through setup in my next build.
Most of the guides I see require kernel modifications. Does this mean I will not be able to update my kernel with the normal upgrade process?
My fear is: an hour or a week after i do the initial GPU Passthrough setup "Dirty Cow2" will come along and I won't be able to upgrade without re-doing a significant part of the setup.
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Depends on the version of Linux you choose, with Fedora I did not have to do that as the mods were built in, I believe OpenSuse is the same, but on Ubuntu (Debian variants) I do believe the kernel has to be modified, but after the that modification I think you don't have to worry about it again, of course that is if the mods do not break other things.
I went from Fedora 22 to version 23 with no side effects to mention....not sure on other versions how a wholesale upgrade of the host will fair, but once setup it shouldn't be too difficult to get the KVM back up and running after a system upgrade. Once you get a successful pass through and understand what your doing and what is happening it becomes really easy, it's just that first time that has you scratching your head.