• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Gaming and performance in a VM

D

DeadByDawn

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 3, 2004
Messages
477
Hi I am a noob to VMs.

I was thinking of throwing a new install of windows into a vmware vm and making that my "new" instance of my gaming rig.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks.
 
Are you talking about passing through a GPU and USB controller and using it like a workstation...?

It definitely works but it is not as awesome as you would hope for. You will not get the same experience and may be frustrated often by delays
 
for old games it might work OK, but not for newer games....
Your best bet is to install vmware on your gaming rig, then use that VM for all your day to day stuff (email, chats, etc) that way you can upgrade the gaming rig at will and not have to reconfigure all your software/apps...just would have to copy the VM file back to the 'new' gaming rig
 
If you want a gaming VM, Linux & Xen with a Win VM is the only current way to do it well. From what I've read of other solutions, they're not quite up to par yet. I don't think there's anything that runs reliably well on a Win / Win VM setup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhiCAu5wn74 Check out his Blog posted in the video description.
He uses Gentoo, but that might not be your preferred Linux distro.
 
Daemonfly said:
If you want a gaming VM, Linux & Xen with a Win VM is the only current way to do it well. From what I've read of other solutions, they're not quite up to par yet. I don't think there's anything that runs reliably well on a Win / Win VM setup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhiCAu5wn74 Check out his Blog posted in the video description.
He uses Gentoo, but that might not be your preferred Linux distro.
Click to expand...

Yeah I think you'll need a type one hypervisor (bare metal) and hardware that supports IOMMU. I do this with Xenserver and it works well, I hear it can be done with some other type ones but not with type two hypervisors (hosted on some OS).
 
DeadByDawn said:
Hi I am a noob to VMs.

I was thinking of throwing a new install of windows into a vmware vm and making that my "new" instance of my gaming rig.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

You are doing it wrong it if you go that route.

As others have said you need to use a baremetal hypervisor to accomplish this with good results. The machine in my sig works perfectly for this. Well 99% perfectly. I have an issue with HDMI audio from the graphics card, but I purchased a USB soundcard so that doesn't matter anymore.

http://thehomeserverblog.com/ - I got my research start from this guy's blog.

If you go this route, I cannot stress enough of the importance of making sure your hardware is compatible before purchase
 
I did this for a while with Linux + KVM, with about 90% of native performance for the few benchmarks I ran. I passed through a 7870, the third party USB 3 controller, onboard sound and about half of the threads/RAM from the host (i7 3770, 16GB). Worked OK, would sometimes lock up the host. Eventually stopped working due to kernel changes, and I went for a mini itx gaming build recycling some of the hardware.

The VMWare (workstation/player) route of using the emulated video card will probably work ok for older games. IIRC, you get a basic DX 9 emulated card that way.
 
VMware workstation has support for 3D without taking over the grahics card entirely. I have never gotten any useful game to run in that.

Xen and PCI passthrough is it. But didn't NVidia give us lots of shit with running their binary drivers in a Dom0?
 
Xen. Works brilliantly and has done for months for me...

I post everything required to get a fully working machine at blog.ktz.me
 
Ive setup a test box to try pass through of video in ESXI and no luck so far.
As its an amd HDMI card (only a cheapo but just testing so far) I want to passthrough the HDMI connection for XBMC/odd bit of old gaming.
Ill rather keep with ESXI as using it in anouther rig and could not be happier. Would be nice to have it running the same incase of any downtime i can import VM's
 
Kerbysj said:
Ive setup a test box to try pass through of video in ESXI and no luck so far.
As its an amd HDMI card (only a cheapo but just testing so far) I want to passthrough the HDMI connection for XBMC/odd bit of old gaming.
Ill rather keep with ESXI as using it in anouther rig and could not be happier. Would be nice to have it running the same incase of any downtime i can import VM's
Click to expand...

what video card are you using? I'm not sure but I remember reading somewhere that it only works with AMD RadeonHD series cards. I have a 5750 and a 7950 that work without issues.
My box is built pretty much off what this guy did in his blog
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top