Virtualization for games in Windows

[Eponymous98]

Hey,

Is there a way to play games in a Virtual Machine without any, or with minimal loss in performance?

Thanks

[Oshino Shinobu]

Hardware passthrough is often the best for performance as you don't have the overhead from going through the hypervisor. 

 

Playing games on a VM is a pretty niche use case though.

[Master Disaster]

It can be done with a Linux host though its not exactly trivial. AFAIK its impossible on Windows (though I'm happy to be corrected on that).

 

Modern VMs are actually a lot more capable with 3D acceleration than they used to be and will play games from the XP era or earlier with decent performance. Obviously the earlier you go the better things tend to perform.

[Eponymous98]

5 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

It can be done with a Linux host though its not exactly trivial. AFAIK its impossible on Windows (though I'm happy to be corrected on that).

 

Modern VMs are actually a lot more capable with 3D acceleration than they used to be and will play games from the XP era or earlier with decent performance. Obviously the earlier you go the better things tend to perform.

Actually I’m interested in playing newer games in the vm. So can it be done with a linux host? Or will the loss in performance be so much that it is not worth it?

[Eponymous98]

10 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Hardware passthrough is often the best for performance as you don't have the overhead from going through the hypervisor. 

 

Playing games on a VM is a pretty niche use case though.

Thanks for the reply!

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, Eponymous98 said:

Actually I’m interested in playing newer games in the vm. So can it be done with a linux host? Or will the loss in performance be so much that it is not worth it?

It really depends on the use case. Do you need to play on a VM? If you can play it on a bare metal OS you'd be better off.

 

If you only need a few VMs, you could just play on the bare metal OS and use it as a hypervisor rather than playing on a VM.

[George.]

depending on the games and your HW you could definitely play some less demanding titles.

However, in the case of very old games, check the driver and hw compatibility because I skipped that once and it costed me my whole day haha.

So my gf wanted to play a very old strategy game that didn't run on anything past xp (and vista with patches) on her laptop and I did everything vm-wise (xp service pack 3), installed all drivers I could find, even applied some tweaks in the config file of the game and it would just keep crashing every single time, no matter in what mode I would run it in (compatibility, as admin, with disabled enchancements, etc.), Literally dug into the OS configs, edited the registry and whatnot....

 

Turns out (and It's pretty obvious when you think about it) the game doesn't support intel gpus (integrated graphics) because they didn't exist back when it was made.   felt like a moron after everything I did that day. 

 

[Eponymous98]

Thanks for all your replies!

I’ll probably make a separate boot with windows to play games and test/run programs that seem sketchy.