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Wine / Steam's Proton does a decent job, and some older games even work better with Wine than with Windows 10. If you have a spare GPU, a VM with PCI passthrou

Wine / Steam's Proton does a decent job, and some older games even work better with Wine than with Windows 10. If you have a spare GPU, a VM with PCI passthrough does an even better job, except for some anti-cheat software that artificially discriminates against this setup. In theory it ought to be possible to switch a single GPU to/from a VM without a reboot. In practice I have no idea how huge a refactoring to the Linux graphics stack that'd require.

mcv 6y ago
> "some older games even work better with Wine than with Windows 10." This has been true for 16 bit games since long before Windows 10. Ages ago one of my favourite games stopped working on Windows, but Wine had no problems with it. So my impression has always been that Wine is excellent for really old games, but slightly more recent games, it could already be very hit and miss. > "If you have a spare GPU, a VM with PCI passthrough does an even better job, except for some anti-cheat software that artificially discriminates against this setup." Doesn't every CPU these days have onboard graphics? My Thinkpad X1E should support hybrid graphics, so it'd be nice if I could give the GPU to a VM and have the desktop use the CPU graphics. But if a Windows VM does a better job, that means Wine doesn't yet do as good a job as Windows. Though it's certainly true that Steam support for Linux is growing. But I don't think every Steam game already works on Linux.
- mpartel 6y ago
  > Doesn't every CPU these days have onboard graphics? On laptops, pretty much. On Intel desktops, yes, aside from Xeons. On AMD desktops, only some lower end Ryzens have "G" models.
- azernik 6y ago
  Wine has gotten very good at recent games... or more specifically, Proton has. (Proton is a Steam-maintained fork of Wine, and is built in to the Steam client.) Official Proton "support" is limited, because it requires certification by Valve and/or the game developers that the game runs well (the equivalent of a "native" rating on winedb/protondb), but if you're willing to go down to "gold" levels of support it still runs 70-80% of all Steam windows games. See https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
- justinclift 6y ago
  > Doesn't every CPU these days have onboard graphics? Don't bother attempting GPU passthrough on any laptop with an AMD CPU (eg Ryzen 2700U) and Radeon GPU (eg RX 560X). It turns out the GPU passthrough needs a dump of the Radeon BIOS provided as a file, but no-one can dump the BIOS of discrete AMD laptop GPUs. :( :( :( Note the complete lack of RX 560X BIOS's here: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=AMD https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=AMD
m01 6y ago
> In theory it ought to be possible to switch a single GPU to/from a VM without a reboot. In practice I have no idea how huge a refactoring to the Linux graphics stack that'd require. I've got this working today. I do it through swapping the nvidia driver for the vfio-pci driver (and back again if required). The slight annoyance is that you may need to restart X11 (for me this is not an issue). I wrote about this some years ago: https://me.m01.eu/blog/2016/05/pci-passthrough-vm-monitor-setup/ https://me.m01.eu/blog/2016/05/pci-passthrough-vm-monitor-se...

mcv 6y ago

> "some older games even work better with Wine than with Windows 10." This has been true for 16 bit games since long before Windows 10. Ages ago one of my favourite games stopped working on Windows, but Wine had no problems with it. So my impression has always been that Wine is excellent for really old games, but slightly more recent games, it could already be very hit and miss. > "If you have a spare GPU, a VM with PCI passthrough does an even better job, except for some anti-cheat software that artificially discriminates against this setup." Doesn't every CPU these days have onboard graphics? My Thinkpad X1E should support hybrid graphics, so it'd be nice if I could give the GPU to a VM and have the desktop use the CPU graphics. But if a Windows VM does a better job, that means Wine doesn't yet do as good a job as Windows. Though it's certainly true that Steam support for Linux is growing. But I don't think every Steam game already works on Linux.

mpartel 6y ago
> Doesn't every CPU these days have onboard graphics? On laptops, pretty much. On Intel desktops, yes, aside from Xeons. On AMD desktops, only some lower end Ryzens have "G" models.
azernik 6y ago
Wine has gotten very good at recent games... or more specifically, Proton has. (Proton is a Steam-maintained fork of Wine, and is built in to the Steam client.) Official Proton "support" is limited, because it requires certification by Valve and/or the game developers that the game runs well (the equivalent of a "native" rating on winedb/protondb), but if you're willing to go down to "gold" levels of support it still runs 70-80% of all Steam windows games. See https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
justinclift 6y ago
> Doesn't every CPU these days have onboard graphics? Don't bother attempting GPU passthrough on any laptop with an AMD CPU (eg Ryzen 2700U) and Radeon GPU (eg RX 560X). It turns out the GPU passthrough needs a dump of the Radeon BIOS provided as a file, but no-one can dump the BIOS of discrete AMD laptop GPUs. :( :( :( Note the complete lack of RX 560X BIOS's here: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=AMD https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=AMD

m01 6y ago

> In theory it ought to be possible to switch a single GPU to/from a VM without a reboot. In practice I have no idea how huge a refactoring to the Linux graphics stack that'd require. I've got this working today. I do it through swapping the nvidia driver for the vfio-pci driver (and back again if required). The slight annoyance is that you may need to restart X11 (for me this is not an issue). I wrote about this some years ago: https://me.m01.eu/blog/2016/05/pci-passthrough-vm-monitor-setup/ https://me.m01.eu/blog/2016/05/pci-passthrough-vm-monitor-se...