Hey op if you do go with passing through your GPU check this out https://looking-glass.io/

Personally a game that doesn’t run on linux turn me down so much that i don’t want to play it at all. Check https://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page

I wanted to go the VM route about a year ago, but I ended up deciding that it was just too much hassle and have kept my Windows dual boot for the extremely rare occasions that I need to use it.

I started out using the GTX 770 from my previous PC as the secondary graphics card to pass through to the VM - which is a lot easier than doing it with a single graphics card - but given how often I actually need to use Windows, I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the extra power use.

So I decided I’d have a go at single GPU passthrough - which took me probably about six months of on/off (mostly off, admittedly) tweaking to get to a usable state. The first time I managed to boot Windows from my Linux install, I nearly cried. After a while fiddling with it, I decided that, as technologically awesome as it is, it really wasn’t that much different than running it on bare metal. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my inability to get Windows to gracefully hand the GPU back to Linux, despite the fact that it should have been as simple as reversing the steps to give Windows the GPU in the first place.

Thank you all for the helpful answers. I’ve deleted Windows and decided to not even try running it again.

Hello Gentoo Linux full-time!

Well in terms of anticheat, VM’s require immense amounts of knowledge to avoid detection. Ive heard specifically that Rainbow Six: Siege will ban you for playing under VM, as well as Valorant. Dual booting is best to avoid anticheat, but if that doesn’t matter, then a VM with passthrough can be extremely performant.

It used to be worth it, but Linux can run so many more games now thanks to Proton and other improvements. Most of the games that won’t run on Linux now don’t run due to anticheat, and many anticheat programs don’t like VM/GPU passthru.

So basically I don’t consider it worth it anymore.

The VM isnt going to have the specs of a true Win boot because some of the resources will be used to run Linux. The Win VM will still take up some storage space even if dynamic. If youre really set on playing Win-only games that are resouce intensive, I dont recommend getting rid of a a true Win boot.

Or, you can be like me and just stick to games you can play on Linux only. As far as Im concerned, if my Linux Mint can’t play them, they don’t exist.

These days this is rarely that useful. The most common reason games don’t work on Linux is anticheat, and games with that kind of anticheat tend to try to stop you from running them in a VM too. There are ways around that, but it’s an annoying cat-and-mouse game.

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GPU passthrough works amazingly well… when you have the required hardware and spend a lot of time to make it work.

It’s an elegant solution but it’s also difficult to setup and maintain. To be fair, I don’t think it’s worth it when you can just have a dual boot going. And you’re going to be running Microsoft’s software either way, soooo…

If you have a very particular workflow that makes it very painful to reboot, then yeah it’s worth it, and yeah it works perfectly well. Otherwise, dual booting when you need to is more efficient and less time consuming, I think.

I did this for a while with single GPU passthrough, Although keeping it working didn’t seem to be worth it in the long run.

I’ve read that the anti cheat engines will be triggered by a virtual machine. Not sure which games you play but you might have issues if they are online.

i’ve had good success with this but ofc ymmv. it can be hard to get your windows vm performance tweaking right and it can take a buttload of time. if you want best mitigation of anti-cheat risk and best performance then you should continue to dual boot imo.

Nah just dual boot. There is a significant performance loss with VMs