Like the title says, what’s the main difference in performance between gaming on a windows VM with gpu passthrough on linux vs windows installed the usual way on bare metal? Talking about steam games and not online multiplayer with anti-cheat.
Because i would really like to get rid of my windows dual boot but for the moment i don’t want to get into linux gaming with proton etc…
Also, i would use this VM for other windows-exclusive softwares.
Thank you in advance!
The main difference is the overhead of hosting another OS, increased memory, disk and cpu usage and potential side-effects with swapping, if the hosts RAM usage is too high. In some solutions for GPU passthrough, the main memory for the passthrough GPU is shared with the VM RAM, so the VMs memory size needs to be increased further.
I run a Windows 10 VM with VMware Workstation and gpu acceleration on my Linux machine, because I have a game that does absolutely not run on Linux with Proton.
It runs like native, but the overhead regarding CPU and memory is there.
I would recommend to play the games with proton instead (since you’re not into Multiplayer/Anti-Cheat stuff, where most of the difficulties lie today)
A VM for Windows-only software, that doesn’t run with WINE and Proton makes sense, but not for playing singleplayer or well supported games on Proton.