So, while i will try passthrough whenever my new GPU arrives, currently i’m waiting on Volta or prices to be reasonable again, but most of the games/software i want to use on Windows are pretty light.
Does anyone know if with a high end PC you can play last-gen-titles on windows well? The only reason i don’t try that out now is because i’m still on an old PC, my new one arrives this week (except for gpu), and everything runs like shit even on linux in this old 2600K.
I don’t expect to run AAA games from 2017, but i imagine Crysis era games would run just fine.
Very true, I guess it’s one of the sacrifices you have to put up with. The fact that you can run any software on one OS on another is in itself a bonus.
I tend to take a more pragmatic view of OS choice. Use what works best to get done what you need to get done. It’s OK the have favorites but that should never get in the way of achieving what you want to do.
So I prefer Linux as my desktop OS, but I want to use Windows software, so I use Windows. Wine is an option so is virtualization but I prefer to just run Windows when it’s appropriate. Just because you prefer Linux should not mean you become a martyr. We don’t judge, OK some do but they are arseholes, don’t be an areshole!
Oh i didn’t mean that at all! The only reason i don’t run windows too is because dual booting isn’t really practical, i work at home and i don’t feel very comfortable using any important data on windows, but i’d love to use it for gaming.
The ideal setup is linux as a main OS and windows with passthrough + looking glass. But since that isn’t an option (my new build uses 1800x + gtx 760, so no iGPU, and i can’t buy a new gpu with current prices) i was wondering if it’s possible to do a vanilla vmware emulation and run 2014- games reasonably well.
I can’t test that yet because the new parts have yet to arrive, and my current PC doesn’t have the ram to run even firefox properly.
I find dual booting to be a kludge, but it does put a pretty good cap on my gaming habits. Similarly my desktop is extremely important to the work I do from home (I can go to my laptop in a pinch, but there’s a definite hit to productivity), and similarly I don’t trust Windows as far as I can throw it. So I don’t keep important data there. It gets games, and that’s it. I’m a little strapped for space, so I have a small SSD that’s just for housing games. It’s formatted to NTFS, and both Windows and Linux games live there. So far, it’s worked out really well. I’ve only attempted to do work from the Windows side once, and I was rightfully burned for my trouble. Never again.
Anyways, that’s just my own personal setup. I wanted to share that because it really has worked out pretty well for me. Though I’d like to do the passthrough setup at some point when I can afford another video card.
On to your actual question. I don’t think you’ll get very far with bog standard virtualization. The virtual CPU is powerful enough to run games like Skyrim without issue. The main issue is graphical horsepower. Without a proper GPU, Windows won’t even try to present the proper tools for the game to start making its environment.
I heard that VirtualBox did some kind of GPU virtualization at one point in time, but I don’t know how good it was. And at that point we’re talking about a type 2 hypervisor, so you’ll take an additional hit to virtual CPU horse power and memory performance. But if you want to try it at all, VirtualBox might be something to try.
I’ve played around with PCI pass-through, and dual booting. One thing I have learned is neither makes for a very stable environment if your going to store important data. The best solution while not the cheapest would provably be to have two dedicated machines. Then again it would cost about the same if your only buying one high tier GPU. I have resorted to using two machines since it’s less of a headache.
While the telemetry isn’t as bad with Linux it still exists. I don’t think there are very many distros that are truly “free”. And the few that are receive less support which brings security concerns.