I've been seriously looking into upgrading my rig to do pci passthrough. Before i do so
1. will it tax my hardware pretty bad
2. is it overly complicated to maintain
3. does it hinder performance
Pci Passthrough for gaming?
Zachary Peterson
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Parker White
1. Not so much anymore if you're using KVM. You get something like 90-95% efficiency. The caveat to this is that this no longer applies to Intel chips because of Meltdown + Spectre. Those two issues hamstringed the fuck out of Intel chips in regard to virtualization. I think there have been a couple fixes, but it's still pretty bad, so if you want to do this, Ryzen is probably your best bet.
2. No, just somewhat difficult to set up, though there are a few guides out there which make it fairly easy now. It's just a bit of a bitch because you need to use a KVM switch or Synergy for your HIDs, and you need to switch inputs on your monitor, or have two displays. Oh right, the setup also requires that you have two GPUs, but as long as you have a CPU with an integrated GPU, you can use that one for the main os, and use your other GPU for the passthrough.
3. See 1.
Leo Sanders
no
only if you have zero idea how to work configurations
by like 2%
Nicholas Walker
1. i don't use my 1070 as much as i wanted. Except that it's working well.
2. once it's working everything will be daijoubu
3. it depends of what you're doing. Let's say i finished NieR:Automata at 60FPS (limited by options) in a VM, and GTA V is working fine in high/ultra at 70FPS.
Ryzen 1700 - GTX 1070 is really a great combo.
David Robinson
You can disable the pti patch if you want.
Adam Williams
Just dual boot you autistic faggot
Luke James
Dual booting is for plebs.
Ayden Hill
I'm posting from my PCI passthrough VM while Overwatch updates right now.
1. only as bad as running windows does to begin with? so not really? your shit will run bad in both the guest and host if your hardware is shit, but even WITH shit hardware it isn't too bad. I'm on a bulldozer FX-4100 CPU, with my VM using 3 cores, it's my biggest bottleneck, and I can still get 100+ fps in most games I've tried with a 1060.
2. no. the setup is a bitch at points, but once it's going, it should just work whenever you boot it. I've had a fedora system update kill my VM in the past, but it was simply a matter of using my backed up EFI boot vars and such to fix it. it seems like it'd be harder to un-fuck if you use virt-manager, and imo you should probably go with a method similar to that explained in this post:
forums.linuxmint.com
3. as the other guy said, it's pretty close to bare metal speeds, but that's IF and ONLY if you set it up correctly. it is entirely possible to get it running but performing like shit if your computer's hardware isn't quite technologically advanced enough, or if you don't set your boot script up with proper optimizations, and some of those optimizations don't play nice with certain hardware, and stuff like that. it's finicky if you want max performance.
dual booting is a fucking horrible solution, I'd much rather run ./win.sh and have windows start on my third monitor than have to close everything, reboot, wait for windows to boot, etc etc
Jaxon Bennett
also, to slightly add to this, and I'm sure you know this, but you will need 2 GPUs, preferably one AMD and one Nvidia if you've got that sitting around. it makes it easier to get the host to handle it, since you can just blacklist the guest card's brand's drivers and make vfio bind it on startup with boot options- it can work with 2 of the same brand but I had some issues, and saw some people saying the same.
Samuel Butler
>Ryzen 1700 - GTX 1070 is really a great combo.
just don't forget that Nvidia tries to Jew you out of running their Windows drivers in a client VM and you need to actively mess with a few extra settings because of it.