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I am giving up on VM Gaming

deployonfri.day

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#11
> GPU sharing with docker and VMs

Yeah, we really live in age of Internet Explorer 6 yet.

We already have cool features in browsers, like transparent backgrounds, rounded borders, and even HTML 5 video elements, but we still cannot use VM intensively for any purpose with no hassle.

Maybe 10-50 years later we finally can use Linux laptop with RTX 5060, and just run a Call Of Duty multiplayer while a local LLM will fix bugs in our code.

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#12
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the windows vm yes.

have you tried using proton//steam on linux lately? I find almost every game I want to play actually works decently well now. The ones that don't are multiplayer/online ones that require some sort of anti-cheat.

There are a few games I've found that don't work under Proton. Rome 2 Total War crashes frequently, Battletech ( the tactics game from a decade or so ago) doesn't always launch and has sound issues, and MechWarrior 5 joystick support doesn't work (the game is fine if you do another input method, but I'm not gonna play a sim game and not use my nice joystick). The instances of games which don't work in Proton are thankfully few and far between, but unfortunately it isn't just games with anticheat rootkits.

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#14
I use libvirt, vfio pci passthrough, evdev and some other stuff and have been smoothly VM gaming for a few years. Mostly just followed the arch wiki when I set it up back then.

I get throwing in the towel with all these issues but I personally didn't encounter half of them.

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#15
I had a stint with VM gaming over Christmas but gave up after wasting too much time trying to bypass anti-cheat detection. My desire came from security concerns; games have a massive attack surface and running them on bare metal makes me uncomfortable. I've always wanted an ephemeral Windows environment for gaming, but it's too much effort to make it work.

I run CachyOS on my gaming PC now and I'm pretty happy with it.

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#16
> UNSOLVED: GPU sharing with docker and VMs

Giving up because you can't solve 'cold fusion' is a common mistake, when we so focused on the problem and forget the goals

At some point is just cheaper to get a second cheaper GPU. Or use a CPU with integrated GPU

> GPU has to be bound to VFIO at boot

You can bind and unbind them at any time. There are several guides for people doing it with only 1 GPU

Just keep it simple

With an amd gpu, using virt-manager I can GPU/USB passthrough with just a few clicks and no command line needed

I also like gentoo QEMU guides https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GPU_passthrough_with_virt-manag...

The other day upgrading VM Win 10 nvidia drivers got a black screen, and was able to copy it as many times to install again other versions

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#17
post #8

> GPU sharing with docker and VMs This should work without needing a reboot. You do have to bind the vfio driver at boot, but the archwiki gives a script to unbind vfio and load the Nvidia driver: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Bi... Which anecdotally worked fine on my RTX3050. I did give up as well though, all of this is just too much of a faff. Hopefully Intel continues to make strides wi…

Yeah, my proxmox game vm start/stop script does the unload unbind, works most of the time, the reset and start nvidia-persistenced.

Setup isn't perfect, but I rarely game and it has very little overhead.

audio does glitch from time to time though, probably scheduler delays or whatever.

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#18
Having gone this route in the past*, once I accepted that I needed a second GPU dedicated as owned by the VM, most issues went away. No SR-IOV battles, just the simplicity of "Linux owns GPU A, Windows VM owns GPU B".

If I am remembering my build from the time, I had an RX 580 for Linux, and a GTX 1070 as passthrough to the Windows VM. At first, it felt like I was "giving up" on solving some problem that felt like it should be solvable, but it worked so well that I couldn't argue with the results.

It also assumes you have a motherboard with the right slots and enough PCIe lanes to get the performance out of two GPUs, and assumes you have a PSU with the power budget to support both GPUs. It definitely was a compromise, not perfection.

*Approx 2017 to 2020, before Proton or when it was was still new/immature. I now no longer care enough about games to play one when it doesn't just work on Linux. I assume the author does not feel this way.

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#19
I had a much better experience gaming on MacOS than I ever did using Linux + X (it was first dual boot with Windows, then double GPU + VM, then proton).

But it's mainly because I do not target anymore games with stringent anti-cheats or with high setup requirements (though the M5 is quite powerful right now), and a lot of games are ported natively to macOS but not Linux (most recent to date is Age of Empire 2 Definitive Edition 1 week ago).

Re: I am giving up on VM Gaming

#20

Interesting article. So for someone who is constrained to one PC, is dual booting the better option, or is there something else?

Best/easiest is probably virt-manager, with 2 GPUs, a cheaper one for the host

And you can swap between linux and windows VMs, or copy them to test things, break/fix it

I have a light Devuan linux host. And several QEMU VMs on top, one Win10 for gaming, one linux PopOS as a "server" with docker and llms, and other VMs..

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