Anybody played with PCI Passthrough on Linux?

iBurley · July 31, 2016

Hey guys,

I've been playing around with a ton of ideas for my next computer setup (primarily going laptop-only, but that isn't what this is about) and one thing I keep coming back to is the idea of PCI Passthrough. My original plan, if I went the desktop route, was to get two physical SSDs and have one dedicated to Linux and one dedicated to Windows. Recently though, I've done a fresh Windows install on my current rig and didn't set up any day-to-day software, just Discord, graphics drivers, and games. That way as soon as I'm done gaming, I'm sort of forced to jump back over to Linux so I don't end up hanging around on Windows for too long. So now, it pretty much doesn't seem worth it to have a physical drive dedicated to Windows, so I was thinking about just using a VM for the few games I still need Windows for.

So what I've been thinking about lately (and TL:DR) is building a system with an i5 or i7 with integrated graphics, using the iGPU for Linux, and then just having a Windows virtual machine that I would spin up on-demand that had the graphics card fully passed through to it, and just use that for all but the simplest of indie games. So my question for those who have experience with GPU passthrough, what's the experience like? Is there a noticeable input latency increase in playing games in a VM?

VicBar · August 7, 2016

Damn... nobody responded... I've looked into it some.. I have the same idea as you. My Ideal set-up would be some linux distro for daily use and a good Windows VM with GPU passthrough for gaming. I don't remember where i read a guide for it but I wonder what did you end up doing? Did it work as expected?

iBurley · August 7, 2016

2 hours ago, VicBar said:

I don't remember where i read a guide for it but I wonder what did you end up doing? Did it work as expected?

Haven't taken the dive yet, and I actually don't think I will. That want I touched on in the beginning about moving to a laptop-only workload is too strong. Current plan is to build a cheap-ish "Esports machine" for like $800 or less to run only Windows for gaming and then just picking up something like the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition for my daily use Linux computer with Fedora Workstation. I've been keeping a spreadsheet with all of my options and their prices and it seems like the most logical solution.