Is it a good idea to run windows in VM with gpu passthrough (nvidia RTX) for certain games, instead of dual booting?
I've been dual booting Linux and windows for about two years now, but in those two years, I have never booted into windows, except by mistake.
This made me think about removing windows and just saving that wasted space for Linux. I only ever dual booted for the off chance the peer pressure to play anti cheat games was too great, but so far it hasn't.
For the off chance where I want to play a game that doesn't run well on Linux, is it a good idea to do that via VM instead of dual boot, or is it too much hassle? Will there be performance hit or any issues with those games?
I've been running a setup like this for years without issues. Only the initial setup was a bit cumbersome, specifically getting it to work with just one GPU. Ran two for sometime before I got it working without issues though
It's possible to do passthrough with a single GPU? I thought the whole point of passthrough was that the guest operating system took control of the hardware directly and that precluded sharing it with the host. Is single-GPU passthrough with an accelerated desktop on the host viable?
Yes it is, but ofc. the host screen goes blank when you start the VM. I run enerything on one virtualization host as VMs so this is not an issue. Basically I can run one machine that requires the gpu at a time, and of course all the headless ones like servers and the firewall keep running normally in the background.
I see, that makes sense. So basically serially passing the device around from one system to the next. Thanks for the response, it's been a long time since I looked at passthrough and this is news to me.