Hello, I’m very new to this community and I have tried asking these questions on Reddit, but they weren’t that helpful.
My wife and I are gamers and we didn’t have a problem with having 2 computers at the same time. Now she wants us to have 2 computers in one and my first answer to that was virtualization.
-My first question is will there be a lot of problems running games with VM? I know that some games do have problems with anti-cheat, but I don’t know the specifics of it.
My hardware options for CPUs and Mobos are i9-7940x or above with x299 or 3900x/3950x with x570. My price range for cpu and mobo together is 600; 400 for cpu 200 for the mobo.
My wife only games, and I do video editing and some blender as a hobby.
-My second question is should I go for x299 for more PCIe bus lanes to make sure I’m not running into any bottlenecks, or am I going to be fine with running pcie4.0 x8 with x570?
-my third question is when running VM do I have to have a graphics card at the top of the expansion slot for it to run, or can I put it at the last expansion slot?(from the top slot to bottom-gt 730, RTX 3070, RX 6600xt, or RTX 3070, RX 6600xt gt 730.) If the answer is 'yes, I have to run gt730 at the top of the slot, then I won’t be able to use the x570 platform, because I haven’t found a x570 mobo with 3rd expansion slot running to CPU PCIe lanes.
Generally the HEDT platforms (Your X299s and TR4s) will give you better performance and CPU lanes but it is pricy. Off the bat, I remember Linus from LTT had these for projects. They are old but maybe you could get something from them if you look at his YT channel.
Alternatively, you could use something like a Gigabyte B550 Vision D. It has two x16 PCIe slots so potentially you could do passthrough for VFIO. But I havent done any of those personally and I dont have that specific hardware as well. I think you can put a small video card (like a 1030) in the bottom slot for the host to use.
All in all, its a lot of headache for what it’s worth. I’d only recommend to get this “2 gamers, 1 CPU” setup if space is a real issue, like a Hong Kong or Tokyo appartment size space issue.
You’re gonna have to use a type 1 hypervisor to be able to do this. You’ll need a pc with 2 gaming GPUs AND integrated graphics or a 3rd gpu that is cheap.
You can then install your type 1 hypervisor and use VFIO to passthrough one GPU to one VM and one to the other VM. Then you plug each GPU into a separate monitor.
You will also have to plug in two keyboards and two mice to the PC and do USB passthru to the VMs. Same goes for headsets/mics/webcams/etc…
I think you would see good performance with something like 5950x, x2 beefier gpus, x1 weaker gpu, 64GB ram, x2 2TB SSDs, and x1 1TB SSD with a high end x570 motherboard, but I can’t be 100% sure. Then you can setup two VMs with 2TB SSD, 16 cores, 32GB ram, and a good GPU each. I have only used GPU passthru on a older machine with a single GTX 1080 and it seemed to work well. There are probably more tech savvy users here who have actual experience with this.
Overall it will require a lot of tinkering to get working just the way you want, and may prove more brittle and finicky than it’s worth. If your host PC craps out, both of your computers are dead.
As for your questions:
- You can configure a VM so that the guest doesn’t even know its being virtualized. You should be able to get all games to work fine.
- I’m not 100% sure, so I’ll defer to the opinion of someone else.
- It may be dependent on how VFIO groups are split up on your mobo.
You have to also realize some anti-cheats like Battleye will not work (it’s extremely inconsistent how game devs implement each anti-cheat and their stance on VMs) and in that case it makes more sense to make 2 ITX systems.
Are most of the anti-cheat based on IP addresses (if so Am I able to sign a static IP address from each VM?) Or are they based on my hardware id?
It’s based on hardware and heuristics. It has to monitor ring 0 for memory access.
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