VM Considerations given Hardware

Software & Operating Systems
, ,
1

Howdy

I have a general questions and seeking giudance/best practices/lessons learnt for a build I am attempting.

I primarily want to use the linux as the host operating system (preferably ubuntu but I am open to suggestions) and then run a windows vm for gaming. Currently I am using everything below (minus the 6700) as my windows work station.

Here are a list of my components:
Aorus Z590 master
i9 11900k
3080ti
rx 6700 xt
Multiple HD and SSD (2 HD, 2 SSD, 1 M.2)
64 gb Ram
AIO 240mm

Ideally I would like to upgrade the mobo to something like a taichi or better bifrication but I think that may be a future upgrade. The reason for trying a vm build is 1. privacy, 2. work needs, 3. gaming.

any input would be greatly appreciated!

2

How much of a gamer are you?

3

@blakegates pretty big gamer. I’d say it’s 50/50 between working and gaming

4

Man I would recommend putting Linux on bare metal(as you mentioned as the host system) and dual booting Windows if that’s the case. It sucks for “workflow” if you need to say, switch back and forth between Linux and Windows, but you’re not going to be impressed with gaming on a VM.

It’ll just be a better experience for gaming. I don’t care what anyone says (suggesting Wine, Proton, Lutris, etc.), gaming on Linux is still just an absolute pain in the ass. Especially having an Nvidia dedicated GPU.

5

HW looks similar to my setup. If you go the Linux bare metal Desktop route, I would run it on the AMD card and passthrough the Nvidia card to the Windows VM.
Myself, I had less stellar experience with vfio on Desktop Linux, to many breakage, to many workarounds, to much latency- I went full Hypervisor (Proxmox) and never looked back. You may have to look how to organize your filesystem and may have to get a USB PCIe card, if you go that route.

Edit: I run my Desktop Linux in a separate VM.

6

I figured Dual Booting would come up here. It is an option I was floating with. Honestly the only reason I would keep Windows is for games that I cant get on Linux natively.

I would opt for the AMD gpu to be the host GPU on linux and then pass through the nvidia card if I were to attempt it. How bad is the performance gaming wise? Games would be FPS and twitch shooters, is it not worth it?

7

So you’re saying put Proxmox as the host OS and then just segment the hardware as I see fit? I have proxmox cluster going seperatly for soem home network stuff, this could be an option… How is it for gaming in terms of latency?

1 Like
8

@Dratatoo, I am interested in gaming, also. I would like to know how is game latency in Proxmox.

9

I cannot complain. I regularly play Final Fantasy 14 Online, Halo Infinite. currently I am playing Final Fantasy 15. I played through Monster Hunter Word and I am on Monster Hunter Rise now. I am also using it for ‚heavy‘ emulation like PS3, Switch and WiiU. Previously I also finished Guardians of the Galaxy and Spyro Remaster. I ran some older “Boomer shooter” like Quake, Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament recently - nothing wrong with that, but they aren’t exactly taxing. Unfortunately I am not into current competitive shooter now, so I can’t say much about that.

Please be aware, that some games running kernel loaded anti-cheat might refuse to run in a VM, Valorant is such a candidate.

I recommend changing the storage setting to virtio-scsi, threaded and single for all VMs if you are using virtio disk devices. Qemu has a bug which causes it to stall if there is a lot of disk io on the guest and host system with the default settings, even if the i/o load is unrelated to the VMs storage. This took me a long time to figure out.

Edit: I cannot speak of other platforms, currently I am using a Intel i9 9900K. There might some issues with Microsoft Flight Simulator in a vfio environment on Threadripper systems.

2 Likes
10

So just a follow up for those who assisted me here. I sat down today and started the set up, to be honest it was relatively straight forward. I haven’t used KVM Linux before but I opted to follow that path for install.

I had an SSD with win10 on it (from the basic bare metal config I ran before this process) so passing that through to the vm was easy enough too.

Initial thoughts are promising. things just seem to work well. I do notice some slight delays or stutters in the vm but I think I can work them out. the network adapter is also a little slow but I think I was just using the default network adapter options in kvm so I can again sort those in the future.

I’ll follow up with some benchmarks and some info on the setup as I progress over the next few days.

Thank you to all that helped and gave me the direction I needed!

2 Likes